Power BI, Windows 7 and .NET Announcements
24 September 2020
It’s been almost nine months since support for Windows 7 ended (back on 14 January 2020). To be fair, Windows 7 has been around for more than 10 years, so perhaps it is time for us all to let it go and move on…
This means that Power BI Desktop will support on 31 January 2021. After that, Power BI Desktop will only be supported on Windows 8 and newer. Further, the January 2021 release of Power BI Desktop Optimized (sic) for Report Server will be supported as per the Modern Lifecycle Policy, i.e. supported until the next release (currently scheduled for May 2021), after which it will only receive security updates until January 2022, after which support will also stop.
Microsoft is also making a change to the version of .NET that is required to run Power BI Desktop. Starting from the October release users will need to have .NET 4.6.2 or greater installed. This is installed by default with Windows 10. For older versions of Windows, the Power BI Desktop installer will launch the .NET installer for you.
