Issue #01 — This week in Excel & Power BI
Tuesday · a representative example. In the live product every item is pulled from the 40+ sources, summarized and linked back.
📣 News & announcements
August Power BI Desktop feature summary is live
New DAX window-function options, on-object formatting improvements and Copilot updates ship in the August build.
Fabric adds more Direct Lake surface area
Direct Lake now covers additional connectors and a smoother fallback path to DirectQuery.
Excel for the web: new Insider LAMBDA helpers
REDUCE/SCAN patterns get first-class examples in the Insider channel.
🧩 Release notes
Power Query: query-folding indicators improved
'View Native Query' now surfaces on more transformation steps.
Office Scripts: scheduled triggers via Power Automate
Run a script on a recurring schedule without opening the workbook.
💬 Community Q&A
How do OFFSET and WINDOW differ for running totals?
Top-voted answer walks through partitioning and ABS/REL framing with a worked measure.
Direct Lake model keeps falling back to DirectQuery
Community thread pins the cause to unsupported data types and SKU guardrails.
Best way to unpivot 60 monthly columns in Power Query?
Answer: select the id columns, right-click → Unpivot Other Columns; keep it foldable.
🎬 Videos, summarized
Direct Lake explained in 12 minutes
Guy in a Cube breaks down when Direct Lake beats import and where it falls back.
Window functions: the end of self-joins in DAX
SQLBI demonstrates INDEX/OFFSET/WINDOW with period-over-period examples.
🛠️ Projects & tools
DAX Studio 3.x: faster query plans view
New build improves server-timings capture and export.
Measure Killer: unused-measure cleanup
Scan a model for unused measures and columns before shipping.
🎓 Events & certs
DP-600 (Fabric Analytics Engineer) study path refreshed
Microsoft Learn updates the skills-measured outline ahead of the next window.
Power BI user groups — this month's meetups
Regional groups post agendas and recordings.