Power BI January 2026 Feature Summary

The January 2026 Power BI Feature Summary is packed with exciting news—there are fresh updates, important announcements, and some big changes, especially around upcoming events, feature retirements, and the latest in AI and Copilot advancements.

Some of the standout features include new reporting tools, smarter data modeling options, enhanced resources for developers, broader global standards support and upgraded visualizations. With these improvements, Power BI is making analytics easier to use, helping you work more efficiently, and connecting all your tools even better than before.

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For more details and recommended alternatives, refer to the blog post on Deprecating Power BI Q&A.

For more information and recommended alternatives, refer to SSRS SharePoint Webpart documentation.

The following features are not supported in the Power BI app for Teams operated by 21Vianet environment:

• Power BI notifications in Microsoft Teams
• Power BI preview cards

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Enabling this setting in a semantic model applies three main functionalities:

1. The standalone Copilot agent doesn’t apply friction treatment to answers from that model.
2. Authors can turn on the admin setting to only show approved items in the standalone Copilot experience.
3. Models marked as approved for AI are boosted in the Copilot search experience.

1. Navigate to the Power BI service and find your semantic model.
2. Select the Settings icon in the upper left corner.
3. Expand the Approved Copilot section.
4. Select the Approved Copilot box, and then select the Apply button.

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Why bring Copilot to Home?

Placing Copilot directly on the Home page comes with several benefits:

• Faster insights - start asking questions the moment you land on Home.
• Easier discovery - new users see Copilot right away, encouraging them to use it as part of their natural workflow.

The new entry point will show up automatically when:

• Standalone Copilot is enabled by your tenant admin.
• You have a valid Copilot capacity available.

Prefer the classic view?

You can always switch back to Recommended content using the picker at the top of the Home page. Toggle between the experiences your workflow needs.

To learn more, visit: Standalone Copilot experience in Power BI (Preview).

To address this, we've added a new report-level setting that lets you restore the pre-July 2025 behavior for field parameters' expansion and collapse of hierarchy levels. By default, hierarchy levels remain persistent, but you can switch off this feature for a report using the Persist Hierarchy Level setting. The following examples are where to find it:

• In Power BI Desktop, navigate to Options and settings > Options > Current File > Report settings > Field Parameters > Persist hierarchy level.
• In Fabric, navigate to the report settings and find Persist hierarchy level under Field parameter options.

In the following example, Category is selected, and the Categories are expanded, so you can see values broken down by Year:

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Now, when you change the field parameter from Category to Class, what happens depends on the Persist hierarchy level setting. If it's on, the matrix remains expanded, keeping the Year column visible; If it's off, the matrix collapses and displays only values for Class. The following table provides a comparison showing both behaviors based on whether the toggle is enabled or disabled.

On	Off
Power_BI_January_2026_Feature_Summary	Power_BI_January_2026_Feature_Summary

To learn more about the toggle and its impact, refer to the documentation on Let report readers use field parameters to change visuals.

Improved Color Picker Experience in Power BI

Power BI report creators can customize colors in visuals with a theme color picker and custom color picker. We have added additional capabilities to this release.

• A clear indicator for the currently selected theme color.
• A simple way to reset colors to their default settings.

• A back button to return from custom colors to theme colors.

This enhancement makes color customization more intuitive and efficient, helping you design reports with confidence and ease.

Learn more about color formatting your visuals in the Tips and tricks for formatting color in reports documentation.

Granular Reset Options in the Format Pane

Format pane reset to default quickly let’s report creators undo customizations made to a visual. With this release, you can now reset default with finer control, for a single formatting group in the format pane. This is in addition to the existing functionality of reset to default for the whole visual and each section of the format pane.

• Reset this group settings to default within each section.
• Reset group settings without impacting the rest of the section.

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This enhancement delivers greater flexibility and usability, making it easier to fine-tune your report formatting with confidence.

Learn more about formatting visuals in Power BI reports in the Get started formatting report visualizations documentation.

• Replace basic shape markers with icons or custom images to represent deliveries, facilities, or assets using meaningful symbols like trucks, warehouses, or alerts.
• Scale marker sizes dynamically reflect the data measures such as shipment volume, population density, or sales.
• Customize colors and transparency for improved contrast and visibility on the map.
• Use distinct icons for each category, making reports easier to interpret.

Learn more about the rich capabilities of Azure maps in Power BI reports in the Get started with Azure Maps Power BI visual documentation.

• Drill actions: The new Actions footer lets users drill down, drill up, or drill through data points directly from the tooltip—no need to use the right-click menu or visual header. This streamlines navigation and makes exploring data more intuitive.

• Styling: Tooltips automatically match your report’s theme colors, with options to further customize background, text, and icon colors in both the theme and Format pane.

New reports get updated styling and the Actions footer by default. Existing reports keep their previous customizations, and you can enable or disable the Actions footer anytime via the Format pane.

Modern visual tooltips in Power BI reports enhance usability and interactivity by allowing users to drill down, up, or through data directly from the tooltip Actions footer. These tooltips automatically adopt report theme colors, offer customization options, and provide updated styling by default for new reports, with flexibility to enable or disable the Actions footer as needed in the Format pane.

To learn more, refer to the Create Visual Tooltips documentation.

With this month’s release, that behavior has changed. In reports created from this release onward, columns are once again sized by default based on the content they contain. This makes tables and matrices more compact, easier to read, and better aligned with the actual data.

You can still manually adjust column widths, or use Grow to Fit to expand columns when needed. But by default, visuals now prioritize content-driven sizing, giving you cleaner and more predictable layouts right out of the box.

Here’s a before and after of the defaults:

Before	After
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Power_BI_January_2026_Feature_Summary	Power_BI_January_2026_Feature_Summary

You can now seamlessly open and edit these models directly into the Power BI Service. However, note that semantic models with incremental refresh still cannot be downloaded as PBIX files, and you cannot use the Power Query editor when editing these models in the web experience.

To learn more about editing semantic models in the service, refer to the Edit semantic models in the Power BI service documentation.

Starting with this release, Power BI can be configured to respect GB18030‑2022 encoding using the UnicodeCharacterBehavior setting. This setting is set to CodeUnits by default. To ensure your model is compatible with GB18030-2022, you’ll need to execute a specific XMLA command to set UnicodeCharacterBehavior to CodePoints:

 
 
 
 
[your model id] 
[your model name] 
[your language code] 
[your model compatibility level] 
[your storage engine] 
CodePoints 
...