On June 12th, an interesting piece of news hit the Power BI community. With the June 2025 update of Power BI Desktop, there are no longer any restrictions for the type of data modelling operations that can be performed through external tools.
This is great news for Tabular Editor users, and in particular Tabular Editor 3 Desktop Edition users, as it means that the full model editing experience is now unlocked, when Tabular Editor connects to a model in Power BI Desktop (typically one that is loaded from a .pbix file or a PBIP folder structure).
Below is an overview of new modelling operations that were not possible (or rather, not supported by Microsoft) before this version of Power BI Desktop:
- Tables: Previously, Power BI Desktop only supported added/editing/removing calculated tables and calculation group tables through external tools. Now, any type of table can be freely modified through third party tools, without the ambiguous “pending changes” message appearing inside Power BI Desktop.
NOTE
Tables added through third party tools need to be explicitly refreshed, before you can view their data content or run DAX queries against them. Power BI Desktop will indicate tables in need of a refresh, and provide an option for performing the refresh.
- Partitions: Modifying partitions and partition expressions outside of Power BI Desktop was previously unsupported. Now, you can freely edit these, and even add multiple partitions per table. This is useful when you’re working with very large datasets and you only want to refresh a smaller portion of the data in a table.
NOTE
While tables with multiple partitions are now supported by Power BI Desktop, note that the Power Query interface does not show the M queries behind these partitions. They do show up in the Model View, however.
- M Expressions: You can now edit M expressions on partitions and Shared Expression objects through third party tools. This is useful, for example if you want to run a script to batch update or format the M expressions.
- Explicit Data Sources: While not commonly used on Power BI semantic models, it is now possible to add explicit data sources to a model and reference that data source in the table partitions, rather than implicitly specifying the data source in each partition.
- Data Columns: You can now freely modify columns on tables through third party tools, for example in order to change their names and data types, or deleting unused columns. Keep in mind that the Source Column property on each column must still map to a column resulting from the partition query, and the data type of the column must be compatible with the source data in that column.
To get the full benefit of this feature, make sure to download and install both the latest version of Power BI Desktop, as well as the latest version of Tabular Editor 3.
Happy modeling!
