.pbip file directly, lining Tabular Editor up with Power BI's new developer-mode source-control workflow./definition folder.This summary is produced by the author, and not by AI.
It’s time for this month’s release of Tabular Editor 3 (version 3.8.0). Here is the monthly blog post with a brief overview of what’s new.
Bug reports and feature requests coming from all of you really help, so we wanted to extend a thank you for these.
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Several improvements arrived alongside it, beginning with support for the Power BI Projects format.
The June 2023 update of Power BI Desktop introduced a new way of working with Power BI files locally, namely Power BI Projects (sometimes called Developer Mode). This is a very welcome feature in Power BI, as it offers a much clearer path to version control integration of Power BI reports and datasets, and it also plays nicely with Fabric git integrated workspaces.
In Tabular Editor 3.8.0, we now have support for opening a Power BI Project folder, or a .pbip file (which is essentially a shortcut to the report/dataset in the folder).
As you may have noticed in this 2023 release, Power BI Project folders originally used the model.bim file format for dataset metadata, even though Microsoft had recently announced TMDL: an improved file format better suited for version control integration and modifications through text editors.
Current Microsoft Learn guidance says semantic model metadata can be edited as TMDL in the Power BI Projects /definition folder. The direction anticipated in this release has arrived for project authoring.
A very important update this month, is that Power BI Desktop now supports a much wider range of External Tool modeling operations than before. For example, adding/editing calculated tables and calculated columns is now fully supported! In Tabular Editor 3.8.0, we’ve adjusted the restrictions that apply, when connected to the model in Power BI Desktop, enabling all of the new modeling operations.
In other words, this is a huge productivity booster for our Desktop Edition customers (and any other Tabular Editor user, who develops directly against Power BI Desktop), as you can now do much more of your data modeling through Tabular Editor.
There are still a few things that are not supported, such as adding/editing tables, partitions and M expressions, but if you wish to experiment, you can still toggle on unsupported modeling operations the usual way (Tools > Preferences > Features > Allow unsupported modeling operations).
Tabular Editor automatically detects which version of Power BI Desktop you’re using and applies the correct set of restrictions based on that. You must be using the June 2023 version of Power BI Desktop (or newer), before you can edit calculated column, tables, etc. as mentioned above.
We have made multiple bug fixes in 3.8.0; please see our release notes for full details.
If you have any feedback or experience any bugs please reach out in our community forum. We look forward to hearing from you!
That’s it for the June 2023 release. The big theme this month is tighter integration with Power BI’s new developer mode: open a Power BI Project straight from Tabular Editor, and do much more of your modeling against a live Desktop session now that the old restrictions are gone. Grab 3.8.0 from the downloads page, and as always, let us know what you think.
Try Power BI Project support in the current Tabular Editor 3 workflow.
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