Power BI recently announced an amazing feature called Power BI Desktop Developer Mode.

In today’s post, we will discuss how you can use the Power BI Desktop Developer Mode to track version history and compare the differences.

Here is what you can do with this feature:

Collaboration: Source control allows multiple team members to work simultaneously on the same Power BI project without the fear of overwriting or losing changes. It enables collaboration by providing a centralized repository where everyone can access and contribute to the project.

Version Management: Power BI source control enables you to track and manage version history, compare differences, or roll back to a previous version.

Change Tracking: With source control, you can easily monitor and review the changes made to your Power BI project over time.

Risk Mitigation: By implementing source control, you mitigate the risk of data loss or corruption.

Let’s walkthrough the steps:

Step 1:

On Power BI Desktop, enable the preview feature from:  File -> Options and Settings -> Options -> Preview Features -> Select the Power BI Project option and click OK.

Click on File -> Save as ->Select the Power BI Project files option-> Select Save. You may have to restart Power BI Desktop for the changes to apply.

After saving the file as a Project, you will see 2 folders (Dataset and Report) and 2 files. Click the .pbip file to open the Power BI project.

Step 2:

Integrate Power BI with GitHub to enable Version Control. You can use an external tool like Visual Studio Code, Tabular Editor, or Notepad. For this example, we are using Visual Studio Code. Assuming that you have Visual Studio Code installed and have checked the option to open with Code for the directory, right-click in the folder and select Open with code.

Click Initialize Repository to enable Version Control.

Step 3:

Create a simple Measure in Power BI: TotalSales2023.

Make a change by renaming the Measure to MeasureOne and select Save.

With a Git enabled folder, any modification made in Power BI is backed up and versioned by Git; in Visual studio code, you will see the pending changes:

To commit the changes, add a commit message and click Commit :

You can also run the commit message using Git Bash.

Note: Changes made in an external tool outside of Power BI Desktop require a restart for those changes to apply to an open Power BI file.

Step 4:

Integrate with Azure DevOps to enable collaboration and have multiple developers work on the same Power BI project.

This will be in the next blog post, but hopefully this can get you started with the feature. You can also check the official documentation here.

Happy collaboration 🙂