Introduction
August 2026 moves several features from preview to generally available and introduces a handful of genuinely useful new ones. The focus shifts to smarter Copilot, more control over charts and slicers, and a significant upgrade to how semantic models are refreshed
Copilot Now Reads the Full Report
Report authors often use bookmarks to organise content into tabs, hiding visuals by default and revealing them when a user clicks. Copilot previously ignored these hidden visuals, producing summaries that only reflected what was visible on load. Copilot Summary and the Narrative visual can now read and include bookmark-hidden visuals in their responses. Permissions like RLS and OLS are fully respected. For any report using bookmark navigation, Copilot summaries now reflect the complete picture.
Reporting Updates Now Generally Available
Modern visual defaults and theme pane
New reports now start with the Fluent 2 base theme automatically. The Theme pane lets you change colours, fonts, and visual properties across the entire report in one place. Change a font once, and it updates titles, labels, and callouts across every visual, including new ones added later. Import and export custom themes from both Desktop and web.
Date picker for slicers
Date pickers now combine rolling relative selections with a calendar for manual date picking. A new single-date setting restricts the slicer to one date at a time. Selections can be cleared directly from a header icon. For anyone running period-specific reports, this eliminates the recurring problem of stale date filters that need manual resetting every time a report is published.
Center value for donut chart
Donut charts can now show a value in the center without placing a card visual on top. Set the format, display units, font, and label from the format pane. Use a custom measure instead of the default total. The center value stays in sync with filters, cross-highlighting, and slice selection automatically.
Comments in org apps
Report viewers can now comment directly on report pages and visuals inside org apps, start discussions, and use @mentions to notify colleagues. Comments capture the current report context so others can see exactly what you were looking at when you left feedback.
Matrix column header expand and collapse
Column headers in matrix visuals can now be expanded and collapsed just like row headers. When more than one field sits in the Columns field well, expand and collapse icons appear automatically. Customise their colour and size from the format pane.
Matrix row headers default freeze state
Report authors can now set whether row headers are frozen or unfrozen by default, saved with the report and applied to all viewers. Particularly useful for mobile layouts where unfreezing row headers gives data values more room on smaller screens.
Outer padding for charts
Column, bar, line, ribbon, and waterfall charts now include an Outer padding setting under Layout. Set it to 0% to fill the visual edge to edge. Useful for comparison views where the category axis is hidden, and a legend is used instead.
Azure Maps filtered reload and autozoom
The Azure Maps visual previously had a 30,000 data point rendering limit and would not update when a filter reduced the visible area. Now when a filter is applied, the map reloads to show relevant data points and automatically zooms to fit the filtered area. No more manual panning after every filter change.
Slicer dropdown formatting
Dropdown slicers now let you customise the border colour, open icon colour, rounded corners, and accent bar. For hierarchy slicers, control the colour and style of the expand and collapse icons.
Modeling Update Worth Knowing
Semantic model refresh control
The Refresh button in Power BI Service now offers three options: refresh schema and data together, sync schema only, or refresh data only. Table-level refresh is also available. This matters when a data source adds new columns that are not yet ready to appear in the model. Refresh data only loads the latest data without pulling in schema changes that could break existing reports.
Conclusion
Most updates of the month address specific things report builders and viewers have been working around: Copilot missing half the report, donut charts needing an overlaid card, Azure Maps freezing after a filter, and date slicers going stale. The semantic model refresh control is the standout for anyone managing large or complex models.
If you want updates like these in your inbox every week, subscribe to the Awesome Analytics newsletter.
