Microsoft ships a Power BI update every month. This series covers the features that change in day-to-day work, explained without the jargon. This is October.
October is a smaller release than September, and it includes seven features across three sections. There are no events, third-party visuals, mobile or developer sections this month, which is unsurprising after a September release timed to the Barcelona conference.
Most of it, however, is directly useful to report builders. Six of the seven items can be tried on sample data in an afternoon, and one of them is a visual that has previously required a third-party solution.
The October 2026 update at a glance
The status shown for each item is the label Microsoft applied in the release notes. Where no label was given, the item is described as new rather than assumed to be generally available.
Gantt chart (Preview). A core Gantt visual with milestones, progress formatting, extra task columns and a zoom axis.
List slicer dropdown (Preview). Dropdown mode with selection pills, a resizable drawer and search box formatting.
Show selected first (Preview). Pins current selections to the top, on both list and button slicers.
Chart plot area background (Generally available). Background color and transparency for the plot area, with conditional formatting support.
Auto-expand hierarchy axis (Generally available). Axes expand through levels, with field parameter support.
Personal bookmarks keep column widths (Generally available). Column widths, order and resizing save with a personal bookmark.
Custom visuals via Fabric skills (Generally available). The Report Authoring skill can add, bind, format and validate custom visuals.
Surge protection accuracy (New). Semantic models report capacity usage continuously during long-running operations.
Power BI has a Gantt chart
The headline of this release is a Gantt chart delivered as a core visual, currently in preview. Project timelines have previously required a visual from AppSource, which introduces a licensing conversation, an administrator approval, or a dependency on a third party continuing to maintain it. A core visual removes those considerations.
Bars show duration per row, with progress formatting and milestone markers. The axis provides custom formatting and range controls, so the start and end dates, the date and time format, and the axis units can all be set. Bars inherit their color by category automatically. Additional columns can be placed beside the task list, with owner, status and duration given as examples, which keeps task metadata alongside the timeline rather than in a separate visual. A zoom axis allows readers to focus on a window of time and return to the full range.
The feature is enabled under File, then Options and settings, then Options, then Preview features, followed by a restart of Power BI Desktop. Preview status means it is not yet suitable for client deliverables, but the capability is now part of the product rather than an add-in.
The list slicer gains a dropdown
The list slicer now offers a dropdown option, in preview. The dropdown inherits any list item formatting already applied, and the height and width of the drawer are customizable. The search box has separate formatting for background, border and text.
Two behaviors are more significant than the formatting. Show selected first pins current selections to the top of the dropdown, and is available on the button slicer as well. It addresses a common frustration: after selecting several items from a long list and scrolling away, identifying which values are still selected requires searching the list again. Selections also appear as pills outside the dropdown, each with the item name and a dismiss control, with a count pill shown when there are more selections than space allows.
The Select all behavior merits particular attention before deployment. Selecting all and then clearing individual items produces Not (item) pills, indicating exclusion filtering. Selecting all without clearing any items is treated as no selection and does not filter other visuals. These are materially different outcomes arising from interactions that appear similar, and the distinction is worth explaining to report consumers in advance.
One chart in place of three
Bar, column, and line charts can now auto-expand a hierarchy axis. The Auto expand toggle is located in the X-axis, then Values section of the format pane, and applies when more than one column is placed on the axis. Microsoft describes this as aligning with the auto-expand behavior already present in slicer and matrix visuals.
The more substantial addition is field parameter support on the hierarchy axis. Microsoft's example uses a Category parameter slicer containing Country, Segment and Product, allowing a single slicer to change which fields the axis uses. Report consumers can drill up, drill down or move across levels from the slicer, and the same behavior is available through Personalize this Visual.
Used together, these allow one chart to cover what would previously have required three separate visuals, or a single visual supported by bookmark navigation and hidden elements. The choice of breakdown also moves to the report consumer, reducing requests for additional report pages.
Smaller reporting changes
Plot area background color: Bar, column, line, area, combo, ribbon, waterfall and scatter charts now include a Plot area background section containing a color swatch and a transparency slider, alongside the existing image source, image and image fit options. The color supports conditional formatting from a measure or field value, so the plot area can respond to the underlying data rather than only the marks within it.
Personal bookmarks preserve column widths: Column widths, column order and any resizing now save with a personal bookmark on table and matrix visuals. This completes a change introduced in September, when report consumers gained the ability to set and reset column widths for their own session. Setting a width was the first half; retaining it between visits makes the capability practical.
Agent authoring extends to custom visuals
The Report Authoring skill for Fabric can now work with custom visuals, and this capability is generally available. Through natural-language prompts, the skill can add a visual, bind it to data, apply formatting and validate the result. This covers custom visuals already present in a report, including those imported from a file, and the skill can also suggest a visual from AppSource.
Considered on its own, this is a narrow addition. In context, it continues the agentic authoring work that reached general availability in September, which depends on an agent having access to both business context and an organization's development conventions. Custom visuals represented a gap in that capability, given how many production reports include at least one.
Surge protection accuracy, for capacity administrators
The one item in this release that does not concern report building carries the largest operational consequence. Semantic models now report capacity unit usage continuously during long-running background operations, rather than reporting the majority of it at completion. Surge protection can therefore respond to actual consumption as it occurs, rather than after the fact.
Microsoft enabled this in August 2026 and published before-and-after measurements for one region. Proactive surge-protection rejections rose from 5 percent to 12 percent, and operations that were delayed but ultimately accepted rose from 11 percent to 16 percent. Late-stage Fabric throttling rejections fell from 23 percent to 13 percent.
These figures are best read together. A greater proportion of operations are held back or delayed early, and substantially fewer are rejected late by throttling. For organizations that have experienced a capacity becoming unresponsive mid-refresh, exchanging a late failure for an early delay is generally the preferable outcome. There are no settings that require changing, and Microsoft presents the figures as observed measurements rather than guaranteed results.
Where to start
I have three suggestions for this month. Enable the Gantt preview and spend some time with it, so that the question of whether Power BI supports project timelines has a current answer. Apply the auto-expand axis with a field parameter to a busy report page, as it is the item most likely to remove a visual rather than add one. And if your organization manages a Fabric capacity, raise the surge protection change with whoever administers it, since it alters how capacity pressure manifests and may not have been noticed.
How we think about this at Eigen X
We track every Power BI and Fabric release so the teams we work with can spend their time building instead of reading changelogs. If you want a hand turning any of this into cleaner reports, better models, or a distribution setup that scales, get in touch through eigenx.com.
