This year, Power BI Desktop celebrates its 10th anniversary! The first public version was launched on 24 July 2015, marking the start of a new era in interactive and accessible reporting. Since then, Power BI has continued to evolve, adopting an impressive pace of development, with a new version released every month.
These regular updates have enabled the tool to be progressively enriched, incorporating features that are ever more powerful, but also more accessible. Whether it's data modelling, DAX calculations or customised visuals, Power BI has continually sought to simplify tasks that are sometimes considered complex, making them accessible to a wider audience, from beginners to experienced analysts.
Power BI allows those who wish to do so to test certain features before they are “officially” activated by Microsoft.
We're going to take a look at two major changes designed to simplify operations that many people consider too complex, such as certain calculations or the formatting of visuals:
- Visual Calculations (introduced in March 2024) enable the DAX language - responsible for the calculation part - to be used directly within a Visual, rather than just at the Semantic Model level. This is a very interesting development, because it makes it possible to considerably simplify certain calculations that were previously considered difficult or even impossible to perform, by offering a calculation mode that is closer to what Excel allows, while still being more powerful in many cases.
The “On Object Interaction” mode (introduced in March 2023) is an in-depth overhaul of the system for creating and formatting visuals, also moving closer to what is available in Excel - particularly for graphics - and offering context-sensitive formatting help based on the selected element. Over the years, the visuals have become increasingly complex, and offer a large number of formatting options. The current system has reached its limits, because it's sometimes difficult to find an option in the “Format” panel that's been buried in nested formatting sections and sub-sections.
To activate these features, make sure you have a recent version of the software (May 2025 at the time of writing), then go to “File / Options and Settings / Options”, then to the “Preview Features” section, and tick “On object interaction” and “Visual Calculations”. You can change your mind at any time.
From May 2025, the “Visual Calculation” option will be activated by default, although officially this feature is still in “Preview” mode!
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