Power BI Desktop Integration

As of July 2020, Power BI Desktop adds support for External Tools. This allows Tabular Editor to perform certain modeling operations when working with Imported or DirectQuery data in Desktop.

Prerequisites

• July 2020 version of Power BI Desktop (or newer)
• Latest version of Tabular Editor
• Enable Enhanced Metadata under Power BI Desktop's Preview Features

Also, it is highly recommended that automatic date/time is disabled (Power BI Desktop setting under "Data Load").

Supported Modeling Operations

By default, Tabular Editor will only let you edit a limited number of objects and properties when connected to a Power BI Desktop model. These are:

• Measures (add/remove/edit any property)
• Calculation Groups and Calculation Items (add/remove/edit any property)
• Perspectives (add/remove/edit any property)
• Translations (add/remove)
  • You can apply metadata translations to any object in the model, although be aware that Power BI Desktop does not yet support translations to the default model culture.

Note: If you enable the "Allow unsupported Power BI features (experimental)" option under Tabular Editor's File > Preferences dialog, Tabular Editor will let you edit any object and property, potentially causing model changes that are not supported by Power BI Desktop, which may cause a crash or a corrupt .pbix file. In this case, Microsoft Support will not be able to help you, so use at your own risk, and keep a backup of your .pbix file just in case.