Last month, we shared a packed September update alongside the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference. Even so, the Power BI team has continued delivering new capabilities, and we didn’t want to wait another month to share them.
This update includes enhancements across Copilot and AI, reporting, and semantic models, helping users create richer reports, streamline workflows, and get more value from their data.
Table of Contents
Copilot and AI
Create Power BI reports with custom visuals using skills for Fabric (Generally Available)
Reporting
Gantt chart (Preview)
List slicer with dropdown option (Preview)
Chart plot area background color (Generally Available)
Auto-expand hierarchy axis with field parameter support (Generally Available)
Personal bookmarks keep column widths (Generally Available)
Semantic models
More accurate surge protection with semantic models
That’s a wrap!
Copilot and AI
Create Power BI reports with custom visuals using skills for Fabric (Generally Available)
The Power BI Report Authoring skill now extends natural-language report authoring to custom visuals, helping teams create reports that meet specialized business and design requirements with less manual configuration. Ask the agent to add a visual, bind it to report data, apply formatting, and validate the visualization.
The skill can use supported custom visuals already added to a report, including visuals imported from a file, and it can help identify an AppSource visual when the report needs a capability that core visuals don’t provide. This reduces time spent finding visual identifiers, editing report files, and troubleshooting field mappings, so report authors can focus on selecting the right presentation for the business question.
Learn more in the Power BI Report Authoring skill overview and Install Skills for Fabric guidance.
Reporting
Gantt chart (Preview)
The Gantt visual is a new core visual for Power BI reports that lets you show tasks and progress on a time-based axis. Use it to plan projects, track schedules, or compare activities across categories directly in your report.
Figure: Gantt visual showing a project schedule grouped by Planning, Development, Testing, and Deployment phases from January to April 2025, with the Format visual pane open to the Visual tab.
The visual includes:
Plotting of bars showing the duration of each row with progress formatting and milestones to mark key -dates.
Axis with custom formatting and range controls, so you can set the start and end dates, adjust the date and time format, and choose the units that appear on the axis.
Bar colors cascade naturally by category, which keeps related tasks visually grouped without extra configuration.
You can add more columns next to the task list to show fields such as owner, status, or duration.
A zoom axis lets report readers focus on a specific window of time and then return to the full range.
To try the Gantt visual, enable it in Power BI Desktop under File > Options and settings > Options > Preview features, and then restart Power BI Desktop.
To learn more and try it in your reports, refer to the Gantt visual documentation.
List slicer with dropdown option (Preview)
The list slicer now includes a dropdown mode that makes long lists easier to navigate and active filters easier to review. Enable Show selected first to pin current selections to the top of the dropdown, eliminating the need to scroll through every item to confirm what is filtered. The button slicer also supports Show selected first, providing the same quick view of active selections in either slicer style.
Figure: List slicer in dropdown mode showing selected values as dismissible pills and the Show selected first option.
The dropdown carries over the formatting you’ve already applied to the list slicer items, and you can now customize the height and width of the dropdown drawer to fit your report layout. The search box also has more formatting options, so you can match the slicer to the look you want across background, border, and text styles.
Each selection appears as a pill outside the dropdown that shows the item name and a dismiss button, so report readers can remove a value with one click. When selections exceed the available space, a count pill shows how many more values are selected, so you can see the total without opening the dropdown.
When you use Select all and then clear one or more items, the slicer makes the resulting filter state explicit. Cleared values appear as Not (item) pills, showing that Power BI is excluding those values rather than including every remaining item individually. If you do not clear any items, Select all behaves like no selection and does not filter other visuals.
To learn more, refer to the Slicers in Power BI documentation.
Chart plot area background color (Generally Available)
The plot area of bar, column, line, area, combo, ribbon, waterfall, and scatter charts now supports a single fill color and conditional formatting in addition to the existing background options. A solid color can improve visual separation, while conditional formatting can use a measure or field value to make changes in the data easier to recognize.
Figure: Bar chart with the Plot area background formatting pane open, showing the new Background color and Transparency options.
To learn more, refer to the Customize visualizations in a Power BI report documentation.
Auto-expand hierarchy axis with field parameter support (Generally Available)
Bar, column, and line charts now support auto-expand for the hierarchy axis when you add more than one column to the axis, and the hierarchy axis now works with field parameters.
Figure: Column chart using a field parameter on the axis with Auto expand turned on in the X-axis formatting pane.
This matches the existing auto-expand behavior in the slicer and matrix visuals, so hierarchy interactions stay consistent across your report. Add a field parameter to the axis so you can quickly switch between a single column and any combination of columns as the hierarchy, without rebuilding the visual.
Report viewers can drill up, drill down, or move across hierarchy levels from a slicer, allowing them to explore the data based on the question they want to answer. The same behavior is available when viewers use Personalize this visual to change the chart’s axis fields.
Figure: Selecting a field in the Category parameter slicer updates the column chart axis and the matrix hierarchy at the same time.
The animation shows a report page with a Category parameter slicer, a column chart, and a matrix. When you select Country in the slicer, the column chart updates to show Sales by Country with one bar per country, and the matrix updates to show the Country level of the hierarchy. Selecting Segment or Product instead swaps the chart axis and matrix hierarchy to that field. When you make multiple selections, the hierarchy expands automatically, so a single slicer controls the fields used across both visuals without requiring other changes to the report.
To learn more, refer to the Customize X-axis and Y-axis properties, Drill mode in the Power BI service and Create field parameters documentation.
Personal bookmarks keep column widths (Generally Available)
Personal bookmarks now preserve visual column widths, so you can return to the exact table or matrix layout you saved instead of resizing columns again. This includes reordered and resized columns, helping you maintain a consistent personal view each time you apply the bookmark.
Figure: Save a personal bookmark to preserve your report’s table column widths.
To learn more, refer to the Personal bookmarks in Power BI documentation.
Semantic models
More accurate surge protection with semantic models
Semantic models now report capacity unit (CU) usage continuously during long-running background operations instead of reporting most usage when an operation finishes. This gives surge protection a more current view of in-progress consumption, so configured rejection and recovery thresholds respond more closely to actual capacity usage. The improvement is automatic and requires no settings changes.
Actual capacity measurements from August 2026, when continuous CU reporting was first enabled, show that capacity intervention shifted earlier in the process. Compared with the period before enablement, proactive surge-protection rejections increased from 5% to 12%, and operations that were delayed but ultimately accepted increased from 11% to 16%. Late-stage Fabric throttling rejections decreased from 23% to 13%. These observed changes correspond to a 145% increase in proactive surge-protection rejections, a 52% increase in delayed but accepted work, and a 41% reduction in late-stage Fabric throttling rejections.
Figure: Continuous CU reporting shifts capacity intervention toward proactive surge-protection rejections and accepted delays, based on actual measurements from August 2026.
Continuous CU reporting exposes consumption sooner, allowing surge protection to reject more new background operations proactively and delay more on-demand work without rejecting it. As a result, fewer operations reach deeper Fabric Throttling rejection states.
To learn more, refer to the Surge protection documentation.
That’s a wrap!
The momentum from last month continues with new capabilities that make Power BI more flexible, efficient, and powerful for both report authors and consumers. We encourage you to explore the features highlighted in this post and review the accompanying documentation to start taking advantage of them in your own solutions.
We’ll be back next month with more updates and innovations from across Power BI.
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