February 2025: Power BI Updates With Soheil

After reviewing the enhancements, here are my top three picks this month:

• “How Copilot Arrived at This”
• Conditional Formatting for Visual Calculations
• Monitoring Hub Enhancement for Semantic Models

Additionally, there’s an essential update that all users need to be aware of regarding Power BI Desktop.

Let’s explore these features in more detail and see how they benefit business users and developers alike.

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“How Copilot Arrived at This”

This feature significantly improves transparency by showing exactly how Copilot generates its visual answers. It enables users to understand the logic behind Copilot’s responses by displaying the tables and fields used to create the visuals.

Benefits of this feature include:

• ‍Improved Trust: Users can verify Copilot’s outputs, increasing confidence in the provided information.‍
• Error Detection: Makes it easier to identify and correct inaccurate visual answers from Copilot, ensuring better accuracy and reliability.‍
• Better User Understanding: Helps users learn about their data by seeing exactly where the information originates from.

Here’s a short demo video demonstrating how Copilot works and how you can use it effectively:

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Conditional Formatting for Visual Calculations

Conditional formatting is now supported directly within visual calculations, significantly enhancing the visual customisation capabilities in Power BI reports. This feature allows users to dynamically change formatting based on conditions or values within visuals. Key advantages include:

• ‍Enhanced Visual Clarity: Highlights important data, making reports easier to read and interpret.‍
• Improved User Engagement: Interactive visuals lead to more insightful, engaging reports.‍
• Ease of Use: Simplifies the creation of dynamic, condition-driven visuals without complicated DAX calculations.

Learn more about using visual calculations here.

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Monitoring Hub Enhancement for Semantic Models

This update brings significant improvements to the Monitoring Hub, specifically enhancing its capabilities for managing semantic models. These enhancements provide deeper insights into model performance and usage. The Monitoring Hub update helps administrators and developers by offering:

• Real-time Monitoring: Provides immediate insights into semantic model performance and issues.

• Proactive Maintenance: Helps identify potential issues before they affect business users.

• Increased Efficiency: Simplifies management and monitoring of semantic models, reducing administrative effort.

Read more about Monitor Hub here.

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Critical Announcement Power BI Desktop 64-bit Upgrade

Starting 30 June 2025, the 32-bit version of Power BI Desktop will no longer be supported. Users must upgrade to the 64-bit version by this date to ensure continued support and functionality.

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Final Thoughts

The February 2025 Power BI update introduces powerful enhancements designed to improve productivity, reliability, and user-friendliness. Whether you’re a business user exploring insights through Copilot, a developer applying conditional formatting to visual calculations, or an administrator leveraging enhanced semantic model monitoring, these features provide significant practical benefits.

For organisations committed to maximising the efficiency and effectiveness of their Power BI workflows, exploring these new features is highly recommended.