Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

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Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Part six of a six-part series of blogs
This blog shows the main changes which have been made to Power BI in the July, August, September and October updates, insofar as they affect report creators. Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Changes to themes and general formatting Changes to slicers Changes to charts Changes to matrices Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI (this blog)

Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop

Part six of a six-part series of blogs

This blog shows the main changes which have been made to Power BI in the July, August, September and October updates, insofar as they affect report creators.

Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop
Changes to themes and general formatting
Changes to slicers
Changes to charts
Changes to matrices
Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI (this blog)

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 October 2026

In this blog

Power Query Diagram View
Adding dynamic values to text boxes
DAX descriptions

This blog lists other changes introduced in the July through to October updates of Power BI which don't slot into any of my other categories.

Power Query Diagram View

This new preview feature is enabled by default:

An example of diagram view, showing dependencies between different queries.

Start by going into Power Query and choosing to show Diagram View:

Click on this icon to show diagram view.

You can click on the drop arrow at the bottom of the icon to choose exactly what you want to display:

The best thing to do is experiment, although in truth none of the extra options makes a great deal of difference.

One nice thing to do is to expand a query to show all of its steps:

Click on the icon shown above to show a query's steps in more detail.

This is what you get:

It's now much clearer what the steps in this query were.

I'm not sure that diagrams like this will make it any easier to transform data, but they will show interdependencies between different queries more clearly.

Adding dynamic values to text boxes

With the deprecation of the Q&A visual (not before time, IMHO), there is now a new way to add dynamic values to text boxes in Power BI:

You can find full details of how to use the new way of adding dynamic values to text boxes in Shaun's separate blog.

DAX descriptions

You can now attach descriptions to your measures, although you seem to have to be in DAX query view to do this:

A typical description showing as a tooltip

Here we've given a description to the Total sales described measure.

One way to do this is in DAX query view:

Right-click on a measure to define it.

You can then add your description beginning with three / characters between DEFINE and MEASURE:

DEFINE

/// This measure works out the total value of sales by multiplying price by quantity

MEASURE 'All measures'[Total sales described] = sumx(

// calculate sale value of each transaction

Sales,

Sales[Quantity] * Sales[Price]

)

EVALUATE

SUMMARIZECOLUMNS(

"Total sales", [Total sales described]

)

Provided that you update your changes to the model, the description will now show up for the measure wherever you hover over it.

Parts of this blog
Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Changes to themes and general formatting Changes to slicers Changes to charts Changes to matrices Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI (this blog)

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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