Your weekly briefing from the Excel & Power BI world.
Releases, community questions, videos, projects, events and certifications — pulled, deduped and ranked from across the Microsoft data ecosystem, so you don't have to babysit twenty tabs.
This week's issue
A live example of what lands in your reader every Tuesday.
📣 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.
🧩 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.
🎬 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.
Stop monitoring ten channels. Read one.
News & announcements
Product news from the Power BI, Excel, Fabric and Microsoft 365 blogs — summarized, not just linked.
Release notes
Monthly Power BI Desktop updates, Excel Insider builds, Power Query, DAX, Office Scripts & Fabric — version-bumped and explained.
Community Q&A
The questions worth reading from Stack Overflow, r/PowerBI, r/excel, the Fabric Community and MrExcel.
Videos, summarized
New uploads from Guy in a Cube, SQLBI, Leila Gharani, ExcelIsFun, Curbal & more — summarized from transcript.
Projects & tools
Trending repos — Tabular Editor, DAX Studio, Bravo, Measure Killer, EPPlus, xlwings — and fresh templates.
Events & certs
FabCon, Power BI Summit, user groups and exam tracks — PL-300, DP-600, DP-700 — with dates and deadlines.
Pulse
A live view of what the Excel & Power BI community is talking about this week — trending topics.
Roadmap
Track features across the Microsoft 365 & Fabric release plans — announced, in preview, GA or deprecated.
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