Changes for the July 2025 Power BI Desktop update

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Power BI Desktop updates for July 2025
This month sees a host of Copilot changes, but for Power BI Desktop itself just two new features: the general release of field parameters from preview, and enhancements to pie and donut chart formatting. We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 September 2025

In this blog

Field parameters are now released from preview
Improvements to pie and donut charts

There are two main updates to Power BI Desktop this month - the release of field parameters from preview, and enhancements to pie and donut charts.

Note that there are also many changes to the use of Copilot within Power BI, to Power BI Service and to Power BI connections, but this series of blogs chooses to focus just on the experience of report authors using Power BI Desktop. You can see the full list of July 2025 update changes here.

Field parameters are now released from preview

Field parameters were announced in the November 2022 Power BI update, and have thus taken nearly 3 years to make it out of preview:

An example of a field parameter, allowing you to present data by region, town or shopping centre.

I covered how to create and use a field parameter at the time, and they haven't really changed since.

Improvements to pie and donut charts

Who doens't love a good pie or donut chart? Lots of people, actually, but notwithstanding that Microsoft have improved how they work in Power BI. For example, you can set the background colour and border for an individual slice of a pie or donut chart: