What's New: Enhanced Power BI and Excel with Business Central (2026 release wave 1)

Overview

The session covers three investment areas for this wave: easier demos of Power BI embedded in Business Central, Excel as a client for Power BI semantic models, and updates to the Power BI apps. The demo shows how to pick reports on the Power BI deployments page, deploy them matched to the Business Central version, and view them in the role center.

It also describes using Excel with Power BI apps through Get Data from Fabric to build pivot tables, and agentic Excel for analysing report outputs and edit in Excel scenarios. App updates include a redesigned Subscription Billing app, customer retention analysis in Sales, and ABC analysis in Inventory. Calendar setup guidance covers fiscal and week-based calendars.

Key points

• The five-click Power BI deployment currently works only for demo companies; the presenter says they hope to bring the same setup to production environments later.
• Deployed demo reports are matched automatically to the Business Central version and shown in the role center.
• Recurring refresh scheduling is not part of the deployment for this release; it must be set up in the Power BI workspace.
• Excel can connect to Power BI apps through Get Data from Fabric, and pivot tables can be inserted on the semantic model as an alternative to Power BI visuals.
• Agentic Excel can reason over Business Central data, such as financial report Excel outputs and edit in Excel scenarios, and changes can be pushed back to Business Central.
• Documentation now covers configuring fiscal and week-based calendars so they are reflected in Power BI apps.
• App updates: Subscription Billing gets a full visual redesign, Sales adds customer retention analysis, and Inventory adds ABC analysis.

Features

Quotes

• 0:32 “The investments in this area for this wave is about three things. Better or easier ways to demo Power BI embedded in Business Central.”
• 1:31 “We want it to be so easy for partners if you want to go uh to a prospective customer and demo the embedded Power”
• 1:45 “This only for now works for demo companies. Later, we hope to it make this same setup experience easy in production environments.”
• 4:21 “We have configured the parameters and the first refresh has been scheduled, but if you want to have it recurringly scheduled, you will have”
• 5:11 “Analysis services um had Excel as the main client to do pivot tables and analyze your OLAP cubes. And analysis services later on became”
• 6:38 “There’s another application that’s quite new in the world of Excel uh called agentic Excel capabilities. And this works very well together with edit”

Disclaimers in the video

• 1:45 coming-later: This only for now works for demo companies. Later, we hope to it make this same setup experience easy in production environments.
• 4:00 not-in-this-release: is not currently part of it, uh but that is something we are uh that you would have to configure in your workspace.
• 4:21 not-in-this-release: if you want to have it recurringly scheduled, you will have to do it at least for this release in uh So, for example, I can show it here uh in my workspace.

Presenters (as heard): Kenny Pontoppidan, Joshua.