What's new in the Power BI service – July 2026

Microsoft releases a Power BI update every month, and the July release contains an unusually large amount that you'll notice straight away if you view and work with reports in the Power BI service – without ever opening Power BI Desktop. Here are the highlights, sorted by what we think will make the biggest difference day to day. The full list is in Microsoft's Power BI July 2026 Feature Summary.

Org apps with audiences are now generally available. This means the same app can show different content to different groups – finance sees its reports, sales sees theirs, and management gets its own curated view. For you as a user, that means fewer apps to search through and cleaner navigation: you see what is relevant to you, and nothing else. Microsoft describes how audiences are set up in the documentation on org apps.

The same experience is now also available in the mobile app for iOS and Android. Open an org app on mobile and you're met with your audience's content, which makes it considerably easier to find the right thing on a small screen.

Bookmarks have previously been limited when reports are distributed via apps. Now you can use both report bookmarks (created by the report author) and personal bookmarks directly in the app. If you have a favourite view – a particular cost centre, a particular period, a particular selection – you save it once and jump straight back to it next time. The difference between the two types of bookmarks is explained in Microsoft's overview of bookmarks.

The storytelling feature, which lets you embed interactive report pages and visuals in PowerPoint, now works for content in org apps too. The presentation always shows current figures instead of a screenshot that went out of date before the meeting even started – and you can filter and interact directly in the slide during the meeting. Here's how the Power BI add-in for PowerPoint works.

Conditional formatting is now fully supported for line charts and charts with a legend (bar, pie and donut charts, among others). In practice, this means reports can colour the same category identically across all visuals – the same product group has the same colour everywhere – and that, for example, the current year can be highlighted in colour while previous years are toned down in grey. It's a change the report author makes, but it's you as the reader who gets a report that's easier to interpret at a glance.

Do you handle scheduling of data refreshes or credentials for a model? From August, model settings open as a pane next to your content instead of on a separate page. You don't have to leave the workspace and you don't lose context – and if you prefer the old page, you can switch back.

Several of the new features – audiences, bookmarks and the PowerPoint integration – come down to the same thing: getting the right person to the right insight with fewer clicks. That is entirely in line with how we build our customers' reporting environments and modules, and we'll continuously review where the new capabilities add value in your solutions. The same semantic model the reports are built on can also be queried in plain English with Vellox MCP.

Want to know more about any of these features, or discuss how they could be used in your environment? Get in touch – we're happy to help.