GitHub Copilot for Power BI Projects

This blog post explains, how the GitHub Copilot can be used by Power BI developers to improve the productivity and reduce the development time and effort.

Let me start with explaining a basics of GitHub Copilot. Of course lot of information already available online about GitHub Copilot.

GitHub Copilit is a Gen AI powered coding assistant for developers developed by GitHub and Open AI. It is available as an extension to lot of Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which developers use to write code – Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains and etc.

Let me answer most frequently asked questions,

How can Power BI Developer leverage GitHub Copilot as we are using Power BI Desktop for the Power BI development?

GitHub Copilot cannot be used directly in Power BI Desktop. Developers can use GitHub Copilot in VS Code by converting the PBIX file into PBIP – Power BI project folder is the option. PBIP enables us to store the PBIX file into multiple files which can be opened in VS Code and can edit. If we enable TMDL and PBIR then the model and report will be saved at most granular level of files for easy readability and modify programmatically.

We have Copilot integrated in Power BI Desktop, how GitHub Copilot is different from Power BI Desktop Copilot?

Copilot in Power BI Desktop is available on few sections like DAX Query View where we can ask Copilot to create a new DAX measure by asking simple natural language. Also can use to add descriptions, understand DAX, etc. Also available to suggest synonyms and help developer to create report pages etc.

GitHub Copilot can do lot more than what you can do with Copilot in Power BI Desktop like you can create a new table in model, add description to all tables, measure, columns etc and create measures, create visuals by providing references. Since all the information is stored as a file which is JSON like language, GitHub Copilot can create, modify files with required information.

GitHub Copilot has 3 main features:

Ask – You can ask question as a prompt like in ChatGPT and you will get response in Chat window

Edit – Can create and modify files based on the prompt and instructions

Agent – Automatically perform lot of new and repeated activities by providing the right requirements and prompts.

We have lot of experts already explored this area and shared lot of content for easy reference. I would recommend you go through the content from Rui Romano since he has explained in detail on how to do an agentic development of Power BI project using GitHub Copilot

Please check – https://github.com/RuiRomano/pbip-demo-agentic

I am going to show what are the other possibilities that we can think of using GitHub Copilot in Power BI Development

Let’s assume you developed a semantic model. As a next step, you need to review and validate whether you are following all standards and best practices. We may use different externals tools like DAX Studio for analyzing the Vertipaq analyser details, Tabular editor for BPA rules and may be DAX Optimizer to validate the DAX measures etc. That is a complex exercise but mandatory to perform by developer to ensure the model is optimized for good performance.

Do you think you can leverage GitHub Copilot for this?

Yes. It is possible. We can leverage GitHub Copilot to perform the following acitivites with right tools and instructions.

1. Validate the model against DAX Studio On VertiPaq Analyzer information – We can use DAX VPAX Command Line Interface to extract the VPAX file which holds all the vertipaq information.
2. BPA Rules – Download the portable version of Tabular Editor on the fly and run BPA rules.
3. DAX Measure Standards – Build a document with right standards to be followed as an instructions and rules. Apply the rules on your semantic model and check how many rules are pass and fail.
4. Get a final document in a HTML format with highlighted information for developer to focus.

Let me share the screen recording for easy reference and the documents for you to use in GitHub Copilot.

Get the requirements and instructions from my GitHub repo – Power-BI/GitHub Copilot at master · rhariharaneee/Power-BI · GitHub

What is Next?

As you have seen we can leverage GitHub Copilot to validate the semantic models and get an reference output for easy look and the same can be further extended to fix the issues and rules using GitHub Copilot.

Copilot can even read Report Visual DAX queries and highlight and even can help convert to SQL for data validation. Need to share lot of reference to improve the accuracy.

Share your thoughts and feedback. Happy Learning!!