Power BI - Fabcon keynote, preview features, and March 2025 announcements

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Yesterday we had an whole host of new features announced in the keynote (see my first part in this series for more information). Whilst the main announcements focused on Fabric features, we do have a number of announcements to cover specifically around Power BI. 


If this proves popular, I'll be moving to seperating out announcements for Power BI and the wider Fabric platform separately.


But before we get going on new features, let's address the elephant in the room ...


Power BI Price increases

As of today, the list price for Power BI has gone up by a significant amount (e.g. Premium per user going from £15.00 to £18.50 per user per month - about a 19% increase). From what I'm seeing this increase is pretty much causing the pushback that partners warned Microsoft would happen. If you are licensing via O365 E5 licensing you are excluded from this price change.

The cloud in the silver lining is that whilst it may not seem like Power BI has had many new features in the last year, I know the team has some pretty big things in the pipeline. I can't talk about them today, but all I can say is watch this space and don't give up hope.

The price changes come into effect this week for new purchses, or when your enterprise agreement is up for renewal.

More info can be found at:  Power BI Price increases


Power BI Premium migration to Fabric SKU grace period

As Microsoft previously announced, unless you have an active enterprise agreement, you can not purchase a new Power BI premium capacity anymore.

What they have announced is that if your migration isn't a straightforward example of switching the workspace licensing, you will now have a grace period of 90 days to complete your migration. Allowing you to access the old premium capacity whilst you move. The catch is that you'll start seeing workloads throttled (and possilby rejected) after 30 days.

This is good news to make it easier to migrate, but does start to put time pressures on how fast you need to move.

If you have a Power BI setup that can benefit, have a look at this blog post:  Power BI Price increases.


With these two big points that you might have missed now out the way, it's time to turn our focus to the keynote announcements.

Keynote

Copilot

The big one for the keynote is the availability of Copilot on all Fabric Sku's. Whilst this isn't a new feature for those running premium capacities (as a P1 capacity is the same as an F64 SKU and so they had access to Copilot already), for the small-medium enterprises this is a big change.

Why? It means you can fire up a lower level Fabric capacity, assign it to your workspaces and Power BI desktop instances, and take advantage of copilot for Power BI - even if you don't plan to use any of the other Fabric features.

Dataflow Gen2 improvements

We've got several enhancements to dataflows. The main one is the addition of incremental refresh - meaning that we no longer have to pull all data each time the data flow is run. But if you need to use this, you'll need to get a Fabric capacity for your worskpace as they'll not run if you're licensing via pro or premium per user (my assumtion is they'll run if you have a premium capacity).

Beyond this, your data source needs a datetime field for incremental to be run off of and the connector should support query folding to get the performance you need.

If you hit all these requirements, then it does come with a number of limitations:
  1. The data destination has to have a fixed schema. 
  2. You have to set the destination as being a replace update method.
  3. You are limited to the number of buckets

For me, that first limitation is pretty significant. It suggets that if the schema changes in the future, that's going to be a breaking change that means you have to potentially rebuild the data flow.

The other big one is the ability to migrate from dataflow gen1 to dataflow gen2. Doing this will again need a Fabric capacity, and has a couple of different approaches depending on your usage today. My recommendation is to read the help guide and plan your migration. Reading these guides, it certainly implies that you'll probably have to migrate at some point - whilst MSFT are saying they don't plan to depricate Gen1 data flows, long term it wouldn't make sense to keep both technologies running in my mind.

Direct Lake semantic models in desktop (Preview)

Whilst this is a preview feature today, it's a pretty significant announcement. For those using Fabric semantic models in Direct Lake mode today, you have to really change your usual ways of working to only develop in the service - trying to do things in desktop typically means you use a feature that causes the model to drop back to Direqt Query mode without noticing.

It has been a frustration for a number of Power BI devs. Well no more, this feature adds support to Power BI desktop meaning you don't need to change you ways of working.

If you decide to turn this on, a couple of points to remember:
  • If you choose a semantic model in the service that isn't in DirectLake mode, then you'll get an error.
  • The changes are made in real time, meaning you don't need to save changes as you go.
  • You can edit the model via git by having at least one report attached and commited, and opening the definition.pbir using Power BI desktop to make the changes via Git rather than straight to the service.
If this is a feature that you want to use, be aware it does have requirements and limitations at the moment - make sure you are familiar with the documentation before you start.


Datapoint annotations in Power BI for PowerPoint (Preview)

This is an improvement for adding annotations to a specific data point when using the PowerPoint storytelling feature. For my mind it has limited use cases but some will definately find it helpful. 

What I want Microsoft to do is allow me to embed copilot exec summaries from the PowerPoint integration and allow me to train Copilot as to the types of insight the exec are interested in.

Now we move onto the March release notes.

March 2025 release

In this section, I'll cover off the updates that didn't get announced as part of the keynote.

General

This month we're starting to see improvements to the loading time. This is a very welcome change as it certainly takes too long to open.

The other big change is to make sure you upgrade to the 64 bit version. After 2025-06-31 the 32 bit version is going out of support.

Copilot

Beyond the keynote announcement, we're seing a couple of changes in this space:
  1. The preview message in Teams chats now has a button to open the report in the service and get a copilot summary. This should help new users understand the report easier, and allow execs to quickly and easily get the summary they need.
  2. Improvements to using Copilot to write DAX queries in DAX query view. It now supports user created hierarchies and folder names to add additional context to Copilot's understanding.
  3. For those that missed it, Copilot can now access description and synonym fields in your semantic models to enhance the context of the model. Meaning that you actually have a reason to invest time completing these. Combining this with enancements to the language understanding layer, seems to be a decent upgrade.
  4. Copilot can now create adhoc calculations to support user requests. Previously if you asked for a measure that didn't exist, copilot would error. 

Reporting

In this area, we have the following changes:
  1. Copy report object name and copy report object name in service. These seem complex requirements, but ultimately they've been added to help debugging and tuning.
  2. Referenced column highlights for visual calculations (Preview). This one seems fancy, but what it means is if you open a dax calculation, it'll highlight the referenced fields to make it easier to understrand row and filter contexts.
  3. Enhanced shading for reference lines meaning that you can shade differently either side of a reference line (e.g. shading different quadrents on a bubble graph
  4. Further visiual improvements on card visuals are now in preview
  5. When using a custom theme file you can set style presets on visuals
  6. Insights category added to OneLake catalogue - making it easier to find key analytics assets.

Modelling

A lot of this section is an extension of the keynote announcement, but given the extra detail that's covered I'm going to pick that up here as well.
  1. Creating semantic models in Direct Lake storage mode from one or more Fabric artifacts in PowerBI desktop (preview). Ultimately this one is allowing you to create new Direct Lake models from scratch.
  2. TMDL view support for Direct Lake semantic models (preview). Primarily for those that want a code first enviroment.
  3. Updates to semantic model version history (preview). This gives us a history of changes to the semantic model as it's versioned on the service - critical for those editing Direct Lake models and so great it's available on pro licenses and above.
  4. Data model editing in the service is coming to Power BI (preview). Currently a Fabric specific feature, it's being extended to cover Power BI semantic models.
  5. Use notebooks with your semantic model (preview). Best way to think about this is to help diagnose and improve deployed semantic models once deploymed - almost performance analyser for the web.
  6. For those still using Analysis services, we now have a migration tool built in to help you migrate across to Power BI.

Distribution, discovery, and consumption

The big one in this section, in preview, is adding CI/CD for organisational apps. This means that they are now covered with Git integration (with usual preview caveats), and can be deployed within deployment pipelines.

Other than that we have some nice UX changes for org apps in preview.

Beyond this is the usual connector (Snowflake this month) and 3rd party graph updates. 

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