Power BI October 2026 update: a native Gantt chart, dropdown slicers and fairer surge protection

Microsoft published the Power BI October 2026 feature summary on 15 October. After September's huge AI-heavy release, this one is smaller and very practical: two visuals people have asked about for years, a handful of formatting wins and a quiet but important change to how capacity is protected. Here is what matters, and how to switch on the preview features.

The new Gantt chart (preview)

Until now, a project timeline in Power BI meant a custom visual from AppSource, with all the governance questions that come with it. October adds a Gantt chart as a core visual. Each row is a task, bars show its duration, and you can format progress and add milestones.

One limit worth knowing from Microsoft's answers to early users: each bar renders one start date and one end date. If a task has several phases, model each phase as its own row, and use tooltips or extra columns for the other fields.

A list slicer that handles long lists (preview)

The list slicer now has a dropdown mode, so a slicer with hundreds of customers or products no longer eats half the page. It comes with a few thoughtful details:

• Show selected first pins the current selections at the top. The button slicer supports it too.
• Selections appear as pills you can dismiss one by one, with a count pill when there is no more room.
• "Not" pills: if you choose Select all and then untick a few items, you get "Not (item)" pills, which make exclusions obvious to readers.
• You can set the dropdown's height and width, and the search box has more formatting options.

Formatting wins (generally available)

A note of caution: in the comments under the official post, a Microsoft employee said the plot area background and the bookmark column widths were slightly delayed, even though the summary lists them as GA. If you do not see them yet, update Desktop again in a week or two.

AI report authoring now understands custom visuals

The Power BI Report Authoring skill, the natural-language report builder that arrived with September's agentic features, now works with custom visuals (GA). It can use custom visuals already in your report, including imported ones, and can suggest an AppSource visual when the core visuals fall short.

In practice this means you can ask for "a Sankey diagram of orders by channel and region" and the agent can either reuse a Sankey visual you have already imported or point you to one. As always with AppSource, check your organisation's policy on certified visuals before adding new ones.

Fairer surge protection for big refreshes

This is the least visible change and possibly the most important for teams on Fabric capacity. Semantic models used to report most of their capacity unit (CU) use only when a background operation, such as a long refresh, finished. Surge protection therefore found out about expensive jobs late, and often had to reject other work at the last minute.

Since 18 August, semantic models report CU use continuously while a long operation runs. No setting is needed. Microsoft's measurements for August show the effect:

Fewer operations fail late, which is what hurts most, because a refresh that dies after 40 minutes has already burned the capacity. More are stopped or delayed up front instead. If your refresh failure alerts change shape this month, this is probably why.

What to do this month

New to this release cycle? Read the Power BI September 2026 update for the AI agents and PBIP changes, and keep the DAX cheat sheet close. If you want a quick dashboard from a spreadsheet without opening Desktop, try Data Canvas, which runs in your browser and never stores your data.

Source: Microsoft's "Power BI October 2026 Feature Summary" (15 October 2026) and Microsoft staff replies under it. Preview features can change before general availability, and some roll out gradually by region and tenant.

Alessandro Ecclesie AgazziWritten by Alessandro Ecclesie Agazzi, analytics engineer in London. Updated 17 October 2026. About me