Microsoft Power BI April 2025 Update
Released on 22nd April 😊this is a “light” release according to Patrick LeBlanc due the team attending FabCon this month and the upcoming Microsoft Build conference happening next month.
It really is quite limited this month and I didn’t have any “wow” moments when reviewing the update. Rather my synopsis below has some general information and personal advice.
General
Backward compatibility is impacted by Q&A setup updates
They refer to this as a “version bump” which basically boils down to if one person is using the April 2025 version and updates the Q&A set up, then that file cannot be opened by others in older versions of Power BI Desktop. It’s good practice to have everyone in an organisation using the same version of Power BI Desktop in any case and I cannot foresee many people being caught out by this but it is something that may surprise the odd person.
Reporting
File picker enabled on by default in Power BI Desktop
This is still a preview feature but it is now turned on by default. Personally I did not like this experience when it was first introduced and I found it to be a bit buggy and confusing. I have got used to it now and you too will also have to get used to it as soon as you have the April update! You can turn it off in Options and settings within preview features as shown below but, presuming it will come out of preview at some stage, it makes sense to get familiarised sooner rather than later.
It looks like this:
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Whether you like this feature or not, it is not consistent with other Microsoft applications and, therefore, it is still confusing to me. ☹
Mobile layout auto-create (Generally Available)
This feature creates a portrait view of your report for consumption on mobile devices in a single click. This sounds great but, of course, there is a “but”:
What happens when you add a visual to your normal view? As you may expect the mobile view does not get updated so one has to do it again or manually add the new visual. Additionally, if you customised the mobile view you will have to redo the customisations if you use the Auto-create functionality again.
In short, it sounds great in theory, but in practice it adds a whole load more maintenance.
My recommendation is to test the normal view on a mobile first. You will need to rotate your phone to landscape and then go full screen and see if it is usable. If so stick with that. In most cases I have found this works very well and it saves a heap of development time.
Data connectivity
There have been updates and improvements for connecting to Vertica, Oracle and Snowflake. Good news for those that need to do this I am sure. It’s quite a while since I needed to get data from any of these sources but my last experience with Oracle was painful so I hope when I need to do it again the pain is lessened.
That’s it until we get the Fabric update blog, stay tuned.
Until then,
Ian