Episode 309 – Power BI September 2025 Feature Summary: GA Everything and Time Gets Intelligent

September 22, 2025

Welcome back to the BIFocal Podcast! Jason and John finally got around to covering the Power BI September 2025 feature summary after what Jason described as “way too long” sitting on it. And honestly, after three episodes of Fabric updates that clocked in at nearly three hours of runtime, the guys were ready for something a bit more manageable.

But don’t let the shorter episode fool you – this month’s Power BI updates are packed with some genuinely exciting stuff, particularly around features moving to general availability. As John put it, “There’s not necessarily a lot of new stuff, but GA stuff makes it all really good.

Farewell, Bing Maps (Sort Of)

The September update kicks off with the official removal of the Bing Maps visual icon from the default visuals pane, starting with the October release. This marks the long march toward fully implementing Azure Maps across the platform. The transition has been coming for a while, and as John noted, it’s really about feature completeness and some admin requirements around data being sent to Azure.

The good news? If you’re in a sovereign cloud or working in South Korea or Brazil, Bing Maps isn’t going anywhere. For everyone else, you’ll still be able to add it back manually for a little while longer, but the writing’s on the wall.

Copilot Gets Pushy (In a Good Way?)

Microsoft is clearly trying to get more people using standalone Copilot, because they’re turning it on by default. That colorful Copilot icon is now going to appear in everyone’s left rail whether they asked for it or not. Jason’s reaction was telling: “I’ve used it, but I use it in Fabric and I use it because of the data agent.”

The reality? Neither Jason nor John have found themselves gravitating toward standalone Copilot much yet. When the hosts of a Power BI podcast admit they’re not really using a feature, that speaks volumes about adoption challenges.

But Microsoft has a plan – they’re implementing auto-selection of Copilot workspaces through what they’re calling “smart distribution.” If you don’t have a Fabric Copilot Capacity (FCC – because that acronym means nothing anywhere else) set up, the system will automatically generate a partially randomized list of workspaces weighted toward those with available capacity. It’s designed to balance usage and prevent overloading any single capacity.

Jason’s take on this whole situation? He compared it to school fundraising candy bars being sent home before parents give permission. “They’re sending the candy home with the kid saying, ‘Hey, here’s Copilot, and you get it because they’re paying for it already.’ Now you’re going to help drive our funding up a little bit more.”

Cynical? Maybe. But it’s hard to argue with the observation that Microsoft really wants people to start using this feature.

Enhanced DAX Time Intelligence: Finally!

Now here’s where things get genuinely exciting. The new enhanced DAX time intelligence feature is probably the biggest new functionality in this month’s release. Jason admitted he’s still wrapping his head around all the details, but the core concept is powerful: better support for edge cases and non-traditional calendars.

The feature helps significantly with scenarios where you have a non-traditional calendar – think fiscal years, 4-5-4 retail calendars, or any situation where your year doesn’t start on January 1st. You can now mark dates as your calendar and define how that calendar behaves, and all those time functions within DAX will respect the calendar you’ve chosen.

Want year-to-date but with a fiscal year? It’ll pick the first of that fiscal year and do the calculation to that date. But here’s the real win – you also get week-to-date calculations now. We haven’t had weekly functions in DAX before, probably because there was no reliable way to define what a week period is until now.

John’s enthusiasm was clear: “If you work heavily with that sort of thing, same period, all those date calculations that are calendar-based will rely on this. And yeah, you do get those things like week-to-date.”

Jason’s more measured but still positive: “I don’t fully understand all of the detail behind all of it because I don’t need to. But the detail that I do grasp is it’s pretty great.”

Web Modeling Hits GA – The Game Changer

If there’s one announcement that has both hosts genuinely excited, it’s this: editing semantic models in the Power BI service is now generally available. This has been in preview for a while, but GA status means everyone can use it without hesitation.

The implications are huge. You can now create semantic models from scratch in the web. You get the full Power Query editor experience when doing transforms. You can refresh schemas and data, manage relationships – basically all the things you need to do modeling without touching Power BI Desktop.

As Jason emphasized: “This calls out specifically that means Mac users can now model in Power BI with no desktop required.”

But the bigger conversation is about what this means for Power BI Desktop’s role. The hosts have been telling people at conferences that Desktop is just a companion app. Now that’s becoming reality. Jason was emphatic about the implications:

“If you are running versions behind on Power BI Desktop, stop it. This eliminates – well, it doesn’t eliminate – but this is going to make it so much more difficult for your people who are only doing things in Power BI Desktop if they’re running versions behind.”

His scenario is crystal clear: if you’re on the July version in September, and someone creates a model in the web with September features, you’re going to have problems when you try to open it in your outdated Desktop. Power BI Desktop has to stay up to date now. It absolutely has to.

Timal View Goes GA

Another GA announcement that has developers celebrating: Timal View is now generally available in Power BI Desktop. The team has been doing amazing work bringing these developer-centric features forward, and Timal View provides incredible insight into what models look like internally.

The GA release includes some nice enhancements:

• Full code highlighting for both DAX and M
• Power Query stuff visible at the bottom of Timal View for import modes
• Execution status in script tabs so you can see what’s happening when running Timal scripts

As John noted, even just from an understanding-what-the-model-looks-like-internally perspective, Timal View is fantastic.

Direct Lake Gets Desktop Love

The ability to edit Direct Lake models in Power BI Desktop is now generally available. This has been a fabric-service-only capability until now. When you connect to a semantic model in the service, Power BI Desktop becomes a model editor – you lose the ability to report on the left side, but you gain access to features that aren’t available in the web yet.

Things like the Timal editor can now be used with Direct Lake semantic models. It’s another step in that full parity march between Desktop and the web.

Download PBIX Gets Better (Finally)

One of the most frustrating aspects of web modeling has been the inability to download a PBIX file when you’ve altered the schema through the XMLA endpoint. Good news – they’ve solved a good portion of that problem this month.

If you’ve just used the XMLA endpoint to edit the model, that’s no longer going to block you from downloading. Previously, any changes through the XMLA endpoint would prevent PBIX downloads. That’s fixed.

There are still about 20 limitations listed in the documentation (incremental refresh being one notable example), but the automatic XMLA endpoint editing blocker is gone. Progress!

Performance Analyzer Comes to the Web

Another march-toward-parity feature: Performance Analyzer is now available when editing reports in the web. This has been a Power BI Desktop tool for quite a while, helping developers figure out why something is slow and what they should do about it.

Jason’s take: “This is not something for the default user necessarily from a performance analyzer perspective, but for your more pro user, this is a really great thing.”

Notebooks Get Official Support

Fabric notebooks for Power BI now have official support for Best Practice Analyzer and Semantic Link Labs. You can start these directly from the UI in Fabric. These tools will analyze your models, tell you what’s going on with performance, and let you edit your semantic models.

The coolest part? These tools lean on community work from folks like Daniel Otykier, Marco Russo, and Michael Kovalsky. As John pointed out, Michael is part of the Fabric CAT team but still heavily involved in the community, and seeing his work get official product support is fantastic.

Other Notable Updates

A few other items worth mentioning:

• Transactional task flows are now enabled by default (since Fabric UDF went GA)
• Power BI explorations can now be saved to Pro workspaces, not just Premium ones
• Microsoft 365 search now includes Power BI reports – you can search by title, description, chart title, or contextual details
• Copilot auto-descriptions will fill in report descriptions if you don’t have one (helpful for searchability, but watch what it generates)
• Refresh options in Desktop now let you choose to refresh data or schema separately, or both
• Teams integration now opens Power BI content in a separate window instead of switching context
• NFC tag support in Power BI mobile is now GA – walk up to equipment, scan, see the report

The Bottom Line

September 2025 might not have flashy new features, but it’s a significant month for Power BI maturity. The march toward web parity continues, time intelligence gets the upgrade it’s always needed, and several preview features graduate to GA status.

The hosts wrapped up with Jason trying to get OneLake security fully functional (still waiting on column-level and row-level options) and both looking forward to playing with these new capabilities more.

As Jason noted about the Create functionality in web modeling: “It really feels like I don’t need Desktop. It actually feels like I can start to move away from Desktop because in Desktop I have to enable preview features. In the service, it’s there.”

That’s the new reality of Power BI development, folks. The web is becoming the primary development environment, and Desktop is truly becoming what the hosts have been saying at conferences: a companion app.

Make sure you’re keeping Desktop updated, because the world has changed.

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Links & Resources

• Episode 308 – Fabric September 2025 Part 3: The Dataflow Gen 2 Performance Overhaul
• Official Power BI September 2025 Feature Summary
• Episode 302 – Power BI August 2025: Edit Models in Service, Copilot in Embedded Reports & The Atlanta ER Adventure

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