May 2025 Updates for Power BI

The May 2025 update introduces a range of exciting advancements to Power BI, including a standalone Copilot feature allowing users to “Ask Anything!” in Preview.  Something called “translytical task flows” are introduced to assist with automation in Power BI too.  The Azure Maps visual now has enhanced base map customisation.  Yup, it’s all mapped out this month…

The full list of updates is as follows:

General

• Power BI Desktop 32-bit build deprecation update

Copilot and AI

• Standalone Copilot in Power BI: Ask Anything! (Preview)
• Quality improvements to language understanding for data questions
• Get your data AI ready (Preview)
• AI Data Schema
• Verified Answers
• AI instructions
• Testing with the skill picker
• Preparing a semantic model for AI
• Mark a semantic model as prepared for AI

Reporting

• Automate report actions and data writeback with Translytical task flows (Preview)
• Persisted sorting for field parameters (Preview)
• Easily refer to values in your visual with visual calculations (Preview)
• Updates to the new List slicer (Preview)
• Paste into List and Button slicers (Preview)
• Customise line segment colours in Line charts
• Additional Base Map customisation options for Azure Maps visual
• Upcoming Azure Maps tenant settings and layer ordering updates
• Upcoming changes to the Power BI application in Teams Navigation menu
• Visual updates for semantic models with discourage implicit measures enabled

Modelling

• Selection Expressions for calculation groups
• TMDL view enhancements
• Direct Lake relationship improvements
• Direct Lake and Import tables in the same semantic model

Data Connectivity

• New Google BigQuery connector implementation (Preview)
• Connect to the Vertica database with the user-installed ODBC driver – updates (Preview)
• Connect to the Oracle database with the built-in driver – updates (Preview)
• Improvements in the Snowflake connector (Preview)

Visualisations

• Dandelion chart
• Dynamic Radial Bar chart by JTA
• Action dots: an innovative way to visualise variances in Zebra BI Tables
• KPI by Powerviz
• Drill Down Timeline PRO by ZoomCharts
• PowerGantt chart by Nova Silva
• Profitbase Gantt revamped.

As always, we'll be detailing these updates in our June newsletter. Please remember we have virtual  / online training in Power BI which you can find out more about here.  If you are not already a subscriber, why not sign up at the bottom of any SumProduct web page?  And don't forget to download the latest version of Power BI Desktop here too.