Power BI August 2026 Feature Summary

Welcome to the August 2026 Power BI Feature Summary! This month includes updates across reporting, modeling, data connectivity, mobile, embedded analytics, and developer experiences, with a mix of generally available enhancements and new preview capabilities. Let's take a look at what's new.

Meet the finalists headed to Barcelona to compete for the title of Power BI Dataviz World Champion. Explore the visuals that got them there, hear their tips for creating standout dataviz, and join their virtual cheer squad before they face the ultimate challenge: 20 minutes to create a championship-winning visual live on stage. Reserve your spot.

The European Microsoft Fabric and SQL Community Conference take place September 28 to October 1 in Barcelona, Spain, bringing together Microsoft experts and community leaders for exclusive content, live demos, and key announcements, along with more than 130 sessions spanning Fabric, Azure AI, Databases, Power BI, and Microsoft Purview. And of course, the live Dataviz World Championships finale!

The most recent event in Atlanta sold out. Don’t miss out and register for the Barcelona event with code FABCMTY200 to save €200.

In April we deprecated the old file picker experience in Power BI Desktop. Starting in October, users still utilize versions of Power BI desktop from March 2026 or earlier will no

longer be able to save and share Power BI files to One Drive and SharePoint. Please ensure you update Power BI desktop to keep using this functionality.

Note: No action is required from users as part of this deprecation; this is simply an informational announcement.

Currently, users need Build permission on the underlying semantic model to view and interact with a Fabric App created with the data app template. In early September, consumers will need only Read permission on the semantic model, along with access to the Fabric app. This change supports least-privilege of access by no longer requiring the broader Build permission for app consumption. App authors will still require Build permissions on the semantic model.

Learn more about creating a Fabric app connected to a semantic model.

Authors commonly use report bookmarks as tabs to organize content by showing and hiding visuals on a page. In these designs, certain visuals are hidden by default and revealed only when a display-only report bookmark is triggered. Copilot previously skipped these visuals entirely, so its Summary responses reflected only part of the report.

Copilot Summary can now read and consider these bookmark-revealable visuals in its responses. This covers only visuals that are hidden by default and made visible by a display-only report bookmark triggered through a bookmark button or bookmark navigator. Authors can also select these hidden visuals when configuring the Copilot Narrative visual. Visuals are read in place with no changes to the bookmark state, and RLS and OLS permissions stay fully enforced.

To learn more, refer to Summarize a report with Copilot and Create a narrative visual with Copilot for Power BI.

New reports created in Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service start with the Fluent 2 base theme, giving you a polished, consistent look without formatting each visual. Use the Theme pane to set the base theme, adjust colors to your brand or pick from one of the available color palettes, change text styles, set specific visual properties, page settings, and the filter pane look and feel across your entire report, and import or export custom theme, in both Desktop or web.

Figure: Customizing a report’s base theme and color palette in the Power BI Theme pane.

In this release, we also removed all font overrides from the base theme, so the Text section in the Theme pane now works as intended. Change a font in one place to update titles, callouts, labels, and general text across every visual in your report, including new visuals added later.

For a deeper look at what's included, see the Deep dive into Modern Visual Defaults and Customizing Theme Improvements and Deep dive into modern visual defaults and formatting your entire report blog posts. Learn more about the base themes and the Theme pane in the Visual defaults in Power BI reports documentation.

Date pickers combine relative selections that roll forward as time passes with a calendar and slider for manual date range or single date selection. You can anchor relative options to today, the first date, or the last date in your column.

Figure: Enabling single-date selection for the Date picker slicer in the Selection controls settings.

New in this release, the Single date setting under Visual > Slicer settings > Selection controls restrict the slicer to one date at a time—the calendar and slider allow only a single date, and the relative options are limited to selections that return a single date. And you can now clear selections from a header icon in addition to slicer header.

For more information, see the Slicer visual in Power BI documentation.

Donut charts can now show value in the center, no overlaid card required. Enable the center value and the donut displays it right in the middle.

You control the details in the formatting pane: value format, display units, and font. Add an optional label above or below the value, place an image above or below it, or change the background filling or image of the center. Need something other than the total? Add a custom measure to the center value in the formatting pane.

Figure: A donut center can show a plain total or a custom value, label, image, or background to match your report.

The center value stays in sync with your data: filtering, cross-highlighting, drill-down, and selecting a slice all update it automatically. And because it lives inside the visual, it stays aligned across resizing, mobile, and dashboards, and works with screen readers.

To add a center value, select your donut chart, open the formatting pane, and turn on Center value.

To learn more, refer to Add a center value to a donut chart.

Users can now collaborate on reports in org apps using comments. Comment on report pages and visuals, start discussions with colleagues, and use ‘@mentions’ to notify others and bring them into the conversation. Comments also capture the current report context, helping others understand exactly what you're seeing when providing feedback or discussing insights.

Figure: Comments pane open on a report in an org app comment box highlighted.

To learn more about, see .

You can now expand and collapse column headers in the matrix visual, just like you already can for row headers. When your matrix has more than one field in the Columns field well, +/- icons appear on the column headers so you can combine groups or reveal more detail directly in the visual. You can also customize the color and size of the +/- icons under Column headers > +/- icons in the format pane.

Figure: Customizing the color and size of expand and collapse icons for matrix column and row headers.

To learn more, see Expand and collapse row and column headers.

Report authors can now set the default freeze state for matrix row headers directly in the format pane. Turn the Row headers toggle on or off under Layout > Freeze to control whether row headers stay visible or scroll away when consumers scroll horizontally. This default is saved with the report and applies to everyone who views it.

Figure: Setting the default freeze state for matrix row headers in the Visual formatting pane.

This new setting is especially useful for mobile layouts. On phones, portrait orientation limits horizontal space, so you might want to unfreeze the row headers on your mobile layout to give data values more room, while keeping them frozen on the desktop layout, which typically uses landscape orientation.

Figure: Setting the default freeze state for matrix row headers in a mobile layout.

The right-click Freeze row headers and Unfreeze row headers options are still available and, as before, remain transient — they apply only to the current viewing session, so consumers can flip the state temporarily without changing the report author's default. To learn more, see Freeze row headers.

You can now use links to image files stored in OneLake as an image source anywhere where Power BI accepts an image URL. This works in the image visual, table and matrix cells, the card visual, button and list slicers, as well as for custom icons in the Icons cell element when you use the Field value format style. OneLake file links work even though they require authentication—Power BI signs in on your behalf when the report loads, so you don't have to make images anonymously accessible to use them in your report.

Copy the file URL from OneLake and paste it into any image URL field or into a column or measure set as Image URL.

 Example: https://onelake.dfs.fabric.microsoft.com/{workspace-id}/{item-id}/Files/{path-to-image

Figure: Using a OneLake file URL as the image source for an image visual in Power BI.

Reference layer maps and shape map files can also be linked from OneLake file URLs. Keep your files in OneLake and use them in your Power BI reports today!

For more information, see the Display images in a table, matrix, or slicer and Image visual in Power BI documentation.

Column, bar, clustered, line, ribbon, and waterfall charts now include an Outer padding setting under Layout, giving you control over the space between the edges of the plot area and the first and last categories. This is helpful when you want your chart to fill the visual—especially in scenarios where you've turned off the category axis and are relying on a legend, like a clustered column chart used as a comparison view. Then, you can simply resize the visual to get the look you want on your report page. Reducing outer padding on line charts with categories also lets you show more data before a scrollbar appears.

Figure: Adjusting outer padding and spacing between categories to control how charts fill the plot area.

To use it, select the visual and, in the Format pane, expand Columns, Bars, or Lines > Layout, then set Outer padding to 0%. To fully fill the plot area, also set Space between categories to 0%.

For more information, see the Customize x-axis and y-axis properties documentation.

Shape matching in Azure Maps reference layers now delivers significantly better performance. When you match your Power BI data to shapes in a reference layer—for example, joining sales data to a set of custom territories or regions in a GeoJSON file—reports now render faster, and interactions like filtering, cross-highlighting, and zoom respond more smoothly. No configuration change is required; existing reports automatically benefit from the improvements.

Figure: Improved Azure Maps reference layer performance, with faster rendering shown in the Performance analyzer.

For more information, see the Add a reference layer to the Azure Maps Power BI visual documentation.

The Azure Map visual has a 30,000 data point rendering limit, and previously, points beyond that limit didn't display—even when you filtered the report to focus on a smaller area whose data hadn't originally loaded. Now, when you filter to a smaller selection, the visual reloads to include the newly relevant data points that weren't part of the original 30,000. This means you can start with a broad view of your data and drill into any subset—by region, category, time period, or through cross-filtering—and be confident the map shows the complete picture for what you've filtered to, not just what fit in the initial load.

Figure: Filtering the report to Washington reloads the relevant ZIP code shapes and automatically zooms the Azure Maps visual to the selected area.

The Azure Map visual also now automatically zooms to fit the currently filtered area. When you or a report viewer applies filters, use slicers, or cross-filter from another visual, the map reframes to the extent of the visible data instead of staying at the original viewport. This keeps the map focused on the data being analyzed and removes the need to manually pan and zoom after every..