Episode 291 – Power BI March 2025 Feature Summary
April 11, 2025
This is episode 291 recorded on April 11th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Power BI March 2025 Feature Summary including Desktop start-up performance improvements, Copilot improvements, cool stuff with PBIP & TMDL, and lots of modeling improvements.
Performance Gets a Major Boost
Let’s start with the big win – Power BI Desktop startup performance improvements. Microsoft showed us some animated comparisons that actually had me paying attention (and you know how I feel about most animated GIFs). We’re talking about 2x faster startup times – from 8 seconds down to 4 seconds just to open Power BI Desktop, and report loading times dropping from 17 seconds to 13 seconds.
As John pointed out, that might not sound like much, but it adds up. Especially when you’re doing demos and realize you forgot to launch Power BI Desktop ahead of time. Remember those days when opening a Power BI file meant you could go grab coffee and breakfast? We’re getting further away from that nightmare.
The service itself has been snappier lately too – Fabric’s performance improvements are really showing.
Copilot Gets Smarter (And I Really Need It)
The copilot improvements have me counting down the days until April 30th when it finally hits F2 capacity. I’ve got a client project where not being able to use Copilot is driving me nuts. Nobody wants to spin up an F64 just to get Copilot access, but having it available in F2 for under $300/month? That’s a no-brainer.
Speaking of which, I had to share this embarrassing story – I was working with one of my colleagues, CJ, and I literally couldn’t remember how to write DAX properly. I’ve become so reliant on Copilot that my muscle memory is gone! We ended up switching to M instead because that’s where my brain could still function. It’s a good reminder of both the power and the potential pitfalls of these AI tools.
The new features include:
- Copilot summaries directly from Teams messages
- Better natural language understanding for data questions
- Ad hoc calculations within natural language queries
- Improved hierarchy support
Direct Lake Gets Desktop Love
One of the most significant changes is the ability to create Direct Lake semantic models directly in Power BI Desktop. This is huge, folks. You access it through the OneLake catalog button, and when you choose a lakehouse or warehouse, you get a dropdown option to “Connect to OneLake” instead of the SQL endpoint.
The interesting part? When you do this, you’re essentially using Power BI Desktop as a client to a semantic model living in the service. The save button gets grayed out because there’s nothing local to save – your changes are live in the service.
John made a great point about this being the beginning of Power BI Desktop evolving into more of a general Fabric design client. The UI will need to adapt because you’re not really creating a “new report” anymore – you’re creating a semantic model.
PBIP and Tabular Get Better
The new “Copy object name” feature for PBIP formats caught my attention. When you’re working with all those separate files, being able to right-click an object and get its name to search for in your code editor is genuinely helpful.
Though I do wish we could set custom names instead of just getting GUIDs. Being able to call something “sales_amount_visual_left_center” would make scripting so much more manageable.
The Tabular view now supports these Direct Lake models too, which means you can use Power BI Desktop’s Tabular functionality with models living in the service. I’ve been having fun with this – you can drag a table into Tabular view and it generates the whole script. Then I copy that to Claude or another LLM and ask it to create year-over-year measures. Copy, paste, apply, and boom – done.
We don’t need to create DAX by hand anymore, people.
The Modeling Section Deep Dive
There’s a ton happening in the modeling space:
- Semantic model version history coming to Pro workspaces (finally!)
- Edit data model will be on by default in Pro workspaces
- New “Edit in Desktop” button that launches Power BI Desktop in that connected mode we just discussed
- Notebooks integration with semantic models through Semantic Link
- Built-in Best Practices Analyzer and Memory Analyzer access
The notebook integration is particularly cool. You can now click a button from your semantic model and get a pre-built notebook with Semantic Link references and code to run the Best Practices Analyzer. It’s not perfect – you shouldn’t blindly follow every suggestion – but it’s a massive improvement over the old manual process.
Real World Reality Check
Here’s the thing though – while all this bleeding-edge stuff is exciting, we can’t forget where most people actually are. I spent time this week converting 100 XLS files to XLSX just to work with them. 2010 called and wants its file formats back, but that’s the reality many of our clients are dealing with.
The gap between what’s possible with F64 capacity and what’s accessible in F2 is real, and it matters for practical implementations.
PowerPoint Integration Concerns
The new data annotations for Power BI in PowerPoint look neat, but I’ve got concerns. My worry is that business users will annotate something in PowerPoint and expect it to sync back to the Power BI report. It doesn’t – these annotations live purely in the presentation layer.
That disconnect could create some awkward conversations in executive meetings.
Looking Ahead
We’re heading back to Germany for European Collaboration Summit with a completely reworked tutorial that’s much more Fabric-focused. Then it’s off to Seattle for TechCon 365. The content builds on itself across multiple sessions, which should be fun to deliver.
After that, we’re planning to stay home more this summer. John’s got his pool opening in three weeks (lucky Canadian), and I’ll be dealing with Texas summer starting… well, now. It’s already 87 degrees here, and my hot tub season is sadly coming to an end.
Bottom Line
The March 2025 update isn’t flashy, but it’s substantial. Performance improvements, smarter Copilot, Direct Lake in Desktop, and better modeling tools all add up to a meaningfully better Power BI experience.
The real excitement for me? April 30th can’t come fast enough for that F2 Copilot access.
Links:
- Episode on SoundCloud
- Power BI March 2025 Feature Summary
- European Collaboration Summit
- TechCon 365
- Episode 288 – Power BI February 2025 Feature Summary
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