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Microsoft Power BI Updates Blog

Power BI October 2025 Feature Summary

Headshot of article author Adam Saxton

Principal Program Manager
16 October, 2025

This month’s update brings exciting opportunities for learning and community engagement, including the upcoming Fabric Data Days and the return of FabCon in Atlanta next spring. Notably, Power BI is making strides in mapping capabilities by transitioning from Bing Maps to Azure Maps, ensuring users have access to the latest features and support. Dive into the details to stay informed about what’s new and what’s ahead for Power BI. 

Contents

Events & Announcements

Fabric Data Days are Coming!

Take your Power BI skills to the next level and join us for 2 months of learning, contests, live sessions, discount exam vouchers and community connection.

Sign up for our live session series to stay connected – it all kicks off on November 4th.

FabCon is back from March 16-20, 2026, in Atlanta, GA

Join us for the ultimate Power BI, Microsoft Fabric SQL, Real-Time Intelligence, AI, and Databases community-led event. The third annual FabCon Americas will feature sessions from your favorite Microsoft and community speakers, keynotes, more opportunities to Ask the Experts for 1:1 support, an engaging community lounge with opportunities to network and connect with your peers, a dedicated partner pre-day, a packed expo hall, Power Hour, Data Viz World Championship, and a can’t-miss attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium.

Register with code FABCOMM to save $200.

General

Bing Map deprecation plan & Update in Power BI

To ensure a seamless experience and stay ahead of upcoming Microsoft’s plan to retire Bing Maps for Enterprise, Power BI is proactively transitioning from Bing Maps to Azure Maps. By making this change early, Power BI users will benefit from enhanced mapping capabilities and long-term support. We encourage customers to begin updating their reports to Azure Maps visuals to stay future ready.

Power BI Desktop and Web (Edit- mode)

Earlier, we shared plans to remove the Bing Maps icon from the Visualization pane. After reconsideration, we’ve decided to keep the icon visible for now to ensure continuity and minimize disruption.

Please note that the Bing Maps visual is still slated for deprecation, and we’re currently discussing the timeline. Any existing Bing Maps already in your reports will still be available.

In preparation for the upcoming change, upgrade to Azure Maps unless:

  • You have team members who would consume the report in China, Korea, or government clouds.
  • You’re physically located in China or Korea (regardless of where your home tenant is located).
  • You’re part of a government cloud.

We’re working to support Azure Maps in these unsupported regions. If you and all report users are in a supported region, you’re encouraged to start using Azure Maps now.

Learn how to upgrade to Azure Maps. To see the list of supported regions, see Azure Maps service geographic scope. For more information about Azure Maps, see Get started with Azure Maps Power BI visual.

 

Power BI Report Builder

The migration of paginated reports map visuals from Bing Maps to Azure Maps has begun. This migration will occur in two phases: first, migrating to Azure Maps in PBIRB, followed by migration to Azure Maps for paginated reports in the service. The initial phase is complete. Beginning with the September release of PBIRB, users can create map visuals powered by Azure Maps by default. However, paginated reports published in the service will continue to use Bing Maps until phase two is completed. Phase two is expected to be completed by mid-November.

Paginated reports authors can revert to Bing Maps for authoring in PBIRB until both phases are complete. To enable this, users must set the ‘RevertToBingMaps’ registry key located in the ‘Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Power BI Report Builder’ folder to 1. If the ‘Microsoft Power BI Report Builder’ folder does not exist, it should be manually created before setting the registry key.

Copilot and AI

Copilot to write DAX queries in DAX query view (Generally Available)

This innovative capability empowers users to leverage Copilot assistance directly within both the web and Desktop Power BI experiences, making DAX query creation easier and more efficient than ever before.

Getting started is simple. In Power BI Desktop or Power BI web modeling, open the DAX query view and select the Copilot button. Describe the insights you are seeking, and Copilot generates the corresponding DAX query. Conversationally edit the DAX query with Copilot, run it as you go, and keep it when you are ready.

The following screenshot shows Copilot helping to write a DAX query from the prompt ‘How are we tracking towards our targeted deliveries for each month?’ in DAX query view of Power BI Desktop. The DAX query results show by month the number of deliveries made, the target, attainment %, and variance to target.

The next screenshot demonstrates how to write a DAX query to answer the user prompt ‘Can you indicate which month we were over target or under target on deliveries?’ in DAX query view of Power BI web modeling. The DAX query results show by month the number of deliveries made, the target, variance to target, and the status of each month as over or under target.

Copilot is grounded in the semantic model, and AI instructions set on the model by Prep for AI. This includes verified answers by understanding the fields used and filters applied. Semantic model tables, columns, descriptions, display folders, hierarchy information, relationships, and measures are all known already to Copilot when creating DAX queries.

Copilot to help write DAX queries is used in DAX query view, and in chat with your data experiences when a DAX query is returned as well as data agents when a semantic model is included.

To learn more, refer to the Write DAX queries with Copilot documentation, and try it out today!

Reporting

Button slicer (Generally Available)

Along with this release, we’ve added a few exciting enhancements to make your experience even better, including Cross-highlighting, Auto grid, and more.

Cross-highlighting

Like the Chiclet slicer, the Button Slicer now supports cross-highlighting to help you uncover deeper insights. This means the slicer can interact dynamically with other visuals on your report page by emphasizing relevant values and dimming unrelated ones.

For example: If you select North America in a column chart, the Button Slicer will:

  • Highlight buttons like Canada and United States (since they belong to North America).
  • Dim all other countries to indicate they are outside the selection but keep them visible.

To use this feature, simply drag a field into this new field, well called ‘Highlight label’ in the Build visual pane.

You can now start interacting with now by simply selecting a value on a visual. For example, in the below example if you click on District L1-04 in the scatter chart, you will see the DM of the district L1-04 highlighted while other values are dimmed in the button slicer.

Auto grid

With the new Auto grid option turned on, your slicer layout becomes smarter. When enabled (and it is by default), the arrangement of rows and columns automatically adjusts based on a defined maximum limit, ensuring a clean and responsive design without manual effort.

For example, following is the screenshot with Rows set to 5 and Columns set to 3 and Auto grid on:

Auto grid

With the new Auto grid option turned on, your slicer layout becomes smarter. When enabled (and it is by default), the arrangement of rows and columns automatically adjusts based on a defined maximum limit, ensuring a clean and responsive design without manual effort.

For example, following is the screenshot with Rows set to 5 and Columns set to 3 and Auto grid on:

Following is the screenshot with Auto grid Off:

In addition to these updates, we’ve introduced several accessibility improvements to make Button Slicer more user-friendly and inclusive.

To learn more about these enhancements and how to use them effectively, refer to the Create a button slicer (preview) documentation.

Visual calculations are now supported in embed for your customers (Preview)

Visual calculations are now supported in Power BI Embedded—specifically in the Embed for your customers scenario. This powerful enhancement brings even more flexibility and intelligence to your embedded analytics solutions.

With visual calculations, users, developers and ISVs can now define custom calculations directly within visuals, without needing to modify the underlying data model or write complex DAX. This means faster iteration, more dynamic insights, and a smoother experience for end users. You can also hide/unhide fields on visual and set visual-level format strings.

Automatically expand table columns to fill available space

We’ve added a new option to table formatting that makes your visuals look cleaner and more balanced—automatically. With ‘Grow to fit’, any extra space in the visual is evenly distributed across existing columns when the total column width is smaller than the visual container. No more manual resizing to fill the gap.

If your table isn’t using the full visual width, you can manually resize columns or use Auto-size width, but now there’s an improved solution. For example, this table doesn’t fully utilize the available space:

Navigate to the format pane under Column headers > Options, toggle Auto-size width to ‘On’, and set ‘Resize behavior’ to ‘Grow to fit’. Instantly, your table expands to make full use of the available space.

The additional available space will be distributed across the columns:

It’s a subtle upgrade that makes your data layouts cleaner, more balanced, and easier to read. Note that this will not interfere with any adjustments you make to column widths: once a column width is manually adjusted, it won’t be automatically expanded.

Introducing the new Power BI Controller in Power BI in PowerPoint (Preview)

This feature was developed in direct response to feedback from our user community and is designed to provide an efficient tool for managing multiple Power BI add-ins within PowerPoint presentations.

Users can embed interactive reports and visuals into PowerPoint, supporting data-driven presentations across organizations. As adoption has grown, many of you expressed the need for a centralized mechanism to manage and update several Power BI add-ins across multiple slides. You told us that you are using Power BI add-in for PowerPoint to create data-centric presentations, which you are updating every week or month, and that going over all the add-ins in the presentation and repeating the same operation is time consuming. The Power BI Controller addresses this need by allowing users to execute bulk operations from a single interface.

The Power BI Controller is a task pane add-in that serves as a central command center for all Power BI add-ins within a presentation.

To get this add-in go to ‘Add-ins’ in PowerPoint ribbon and search for ‘Microsoft Power BI Controller’. Select ‘Add’ to add-in to your ribbon. Once you select it, a new panel will open with the list of commands that you can apply. Pick the command you wish to run and click ‘Apply’. This will trigger the discovery phase in which the controller will look for all Power BI content in the presentation and next the selected command will be executed on the discovered Power BI add-ins.

To learn more, refer to View and Present live Power BI Data in PowerPoint.

Performance analyzer in web to see the load times of visuals

In September, we announced the availability of a performance analyzer pane on the web to see the load times of the visuals in your report where your users are going to be viewing it. Unfortunately, the rollout was delayed.

This functionality will be available to your tenant in the next few weeks.

To learn more about this new capability while editing a report in web, refer to the Use Performance Analyzer to examine report performance documentation.

Data connectivity

Export Query Results (Preview)

Export Query Results in Power BI Desktop unlocks seamless data portability and collaboration across Microsoft Fabric. This feature empowers analysts to take transformed, cleaned data from Power Query and export it directly to trusted destinations – such as Dataflows Gen2, Lakehouses, and other cloud stores – without relying on complex workarounds or third-party tools. By meeting users where they work (Power BI Desktop) it reduces duplication of effort, accelerates data sharing, and drives interoperability across Fabric workloads.

To enable this feature, select the Preview feature settings in Power BI Desktop.

Users can select export query results from the PQ ribbon,

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Select an online destination, A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

And export their queries to this destination, where they can choose to modify the Dataflow.
A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The result is improved data gravity in OneLake, streamlined refresh and monitoring capabilities, and a minimal-click experience that supports both new and existing destinations. Ultimately, this feature bridges the gap between desktop analytics and enterprise-scale data integration, enabling organizations to maximize the value of their data investments.

To learn more about how to use this feature: Export Query Results in Power BI Desktop | Microsoft Learn.

Other

Power BI Desktop is now supported on ARM

Power BI Desktop is now supported on Windows on ARM PCs that have the 2025-09 Cumulative Update installed (KB5065789). Adding ARM support to Power BI Desktop brings powerful data analytics capabilities to a broader range of hardware—unlocking faster performance, improved battery life, and seamless experiences on modern, energy-efficient devices.

Why ARM? As more users adopt ARM-powered laptops and tablets for their portability and efficiency, it’s essential that Power BI keeps pace. Native ARM support ensures smoother operation, better resource utilization, and a future-ready foundation for data professionals working across diverse environments.

Whether you’re building dashboards on the go or analyzing data from anywhere, Power BI Desktop on ARM makes it easier than ever.

Visualizations

Sankey Chart by Powerviz

The Powerviz Sankey Chart is a dynamic flow diagram that visualizes the proportional movement of data, resources, or processes across categories or stages. With weighted connections and flexible layouts, it helps users uncover insights within complex systems.

Key Features

  • Chart Orientation: Switch seamlessly between vertical and horizontal orientation.
  • Node Customizations: Control node appearance, spacing, visibility, and interactions for optimal clarity.
  • Multi-Level Support: Add multiple levels to visualize layered, hierarchical flows.
  • Data Colors: Access 30+ color palettes, including colour-blind-safe options.
  • Fill Patterns: Highlight nodes with patterns or upload your own.
  • Conditional Formatting: Highlight outliers with based on measures or categories rules.
  • Smart Labels: Display data and header labels for enhanced readability.
  • Hide Null Nodes: Instantly remove nodes with null or blank data.
  • Image Labels: Add image URLs to show visuals inside or outside the nodes.
  • Import/Export: Save and reuse themes easily.
  • Templates: Use built-in templates or design your own.

Other features included are Sorting, Ranking, Show Condition, Grid View and more.

Business Use Cases

Customer Journey Mapping, Expense Breakdown, Supply Chain Flow.

Your Timeline Slicer: Reimagining Date Filtering for Modern Dashboards

What problem are we solving?

Dashboard real estate is precious, but traditional timeline slicers often consume too much space while lacking the flexibility today’s data professionals need. After experiencing firsthand the limitations and occasional bugs of existing solutions, we built Your Timeline Slicer from the ground up to deliver what the Power BI community has been asking for.

Why Your Timeline Slicer changes the game

Our visual combines the familiar timeline functionality you know with breakthrough space-saving design – reclaiming up to 60% more dashboard space through ultra-compact mode. Beyond size, we have intelligent features that make reporting effortless: dynamic ‘Current Period’ and ‘Latest Available’ filtering that automatically focuses on what matters most, extensive customization options to match any brand or style, and rock-solid performance. Whether you’re building executive summaries, financial dashboards, or mobile-first reports, Your Timeline Slicer adapts to your workflow – not the other way around.

Ready to experience the difference? Download Your Timeline Slicer from AppSource and discover how smart date filtering can transform your dashboards. Based On Website

Drill Down Scatter PRO by ZoomCharts

What if exploring complex data was as easy as scrolling a smartphone app? You could make smarter and more interactive reports that allow more people (managers, C-suite, and other stakeholders) to take part in data analysis themselves and quickly find the insights they need for data-driven decisions. When designing our Drill Down Scatter PRO, we focused on three things:

  • Incredible user experience: Freeform panning. Click to drill down. Scroll or pinch to zoom in. Multiple ways to select data. Scatter PRO makes it easy for anyone to navigate even the most complex data.
  • On-chart Drill Down: Have hundreds or even thousands of markers? No problem – you can simplify your chart by using multiple category fields and combine smaller data points into large markers. Simply click on it to drill down and see more detailed insights on-demand.
  • Customization: Scatter PRO offers all the necessary tools to create the perfect scatter plot for your report. Regression lines, marker, label, legend customization, tooltip content fields, reference lines and areas, and even shaded areas at your selected coordinates! Read more in our blog article.
  • Get Drill Down Scatter PRO

Multiple Sparklines

With the Multiple Sparklines visual, you can design an Income Statement that is both insightful and visually compelling.

  • 1st column displays Profit and Loss as a waterfall chart.
  • 2nd column shows each item as a percentage of Revenue (common-size analysis).
  • The 3rd column presents the past five-year trend.
  • 4th column compares each item with the previous year.
  • The 5th column benchmarks result against two major competitors.

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to create this type of Income Statement, visit:
Income Statement in Power BI

Following is another example of an Income Statement

Download this visual from APPSOURCE

For more information visit https://www.excelnaccess.com/sparklines/

or contact zubair@excelnaccess.com

Performance Bar by JTA

Take your Power BI dashboards to the next level with the Performance Bar by JTA, a clean visual for tracking progress and status briefly. Categories are displayed as streamlined horizontal bars with an optional markers and value label, making comparisons effortless. With simple customization to match your theme – and an optional total bar – it delivers a clear, modern way to tell your performance story.

 

Key Features

  • Bar customization: Configure bar height, colors, borders, and background to match your report theme.
  • Flexible labelling: Show or hide individual labels and choose their position for clear, uncluttered reading.
  • Adjustable scale: Change the scale to emphasize what matters most.
  • Marker styling: Personalize circle markers (size, color, border) for highlights and targets.
  • Marker styling: Personalize circle markers (size, color, border) for highlights and targets.
  • Total Bar: Optionally display a summary bar for an at-a-glance overall view.
  • Configurable tooltips: Define exactly which fields appear and where tooltips show up.
  • Subtle animation: Bring bars to life with a clean growth animation.

 

Resources

Explore more here. Also, if you want to download it, you can find the visual package on the AppSource.

Financial Reporting Matrix v8.2

More control, customization, and clarity

The Financial Reporting Matrix just got even better! With version 8.2.0.0, we’ve introduced powerful new features, expanded customization options, and refined the user experience to give report creators unprecedented control over their layouts, formatting, and interactivity.

New in v8.2

 

Improvements

  • Column header names showing in stepped layout.
  • Hide empty rows with rendered measures in rows.
  • JSON-based row options recognition.
  • Smoother horizontal scroll for formula editing.
  • Row subtotals fix for ‘In rows’ measure placement.
  • Rename your Applied Steps.
  • Change column expansion icon size.

 

Get the latest version from AppSource

BI Pixie by DataChant – Measure the Effectiveness of Your BI Assets in 6 Dimensions from Adoption to Security

Since its launch 2024, BI Pixie has evolved from its initial adoption and engagement measurement offering an all-encompassing intelligence suite for organizations that want to maximize their return on investment in Power BI. BI Pixie now offers insights in six key dimensions: Adoption, Engagement, User Satisfaction, Business Outcome, Performance and Security. Here are the recent updates and new capabilities in BI Pixie.

With its unique instrumentation technology, BI Pixie captures detailed auditing information, providing a comprehensive view of your BI audience and analytic assets. Designed to ensure your data stays in your organization and scale to tens of thousands of reports and users, BI Pixie can be deployed in your Azure tenant or Power Platform environment in minutes.

 

Leverage the capabilities of BI Pixie to drive user adoption, reduce attrition, boost your data governance and optimize the impact of your BI initiatives with our unprecedented auditing and real-time detection of data leaks due to faulty implementations of Row-Level Security (RLS).

Discover more by exploring BI Pixie Dashboard on Microsoft AppSource, and reach out for a free subscription.

 

Closing

This concludes this month’s update.

We hope the information provided in this update is useful. If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store, please leave us a review.

As always, keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next. We are looking forward to hearing from you!