For developers of tabular models, Tabular Editor is a familiar tool—one that is frequently used to develop models. Unlike Visual Studio, this tool is very user-friendly, easy to use, and, above all, very fast. This is because you’re editing only the model’s metadata without loading any data.
Good news! Tabular Editor can now also be used to edit Power BI datasets, as well as to edit datasets directly in the online Power BI environment.
Installing Tabular Editor
After installing Tabular Editor via the Tabular Editor Website It will automatically appear under "External Tools" in Power BI Desktop. The tool can also be used as a standalone application to connect directly to a Power BI dataset in the cloud. In terms of functionality, the following features are currently supported, but it is possible that other features may be added in the future.
- Creating and Editing Measurement Values
- Creating and Editing Calculation Groups and Calculation Items
- Creating and Editing Perspectives
- Easily edit metadata for multiple objects at once
Power BI Desktop
In Power BI Desktop, you can use this tool to edit the dataset for the current report. When you open Tabular Editor via “External Tools” in the menu, the model loads immediately. Changes can be made in Tabular Editor as usual and are immediately visible and usable in Power BI.
Power BI service
As mentioned in the introduction, it’s also possible to edit a dataset directly from the Power BI cloud. However, this requires Power BI Premium. It’s a shame that this functionality isn’t available to Pro users. If you want to open a dataset from the cloud, you can do so by opening the dataset’s connection string in Tabular Editor (File -> Open -> From DB). You can find the connection string in the server settings under the dataset’s properties.
Edit the entire model
As described earlier, the features that can be used within Tabular Editor in conjunction with Power BI Desktop are still limited. However, there is also the option to enable additional functionality. You can do this by checking the box for “Allow unsupported Power BI features (experimental)” in the preferences. However, this can also cause the pbix file to become corrupted. For example, adding tables would still not be possible, so I would be cautious with this option and, in principle, only use the supported features.
When you open a Power BI dataset in Tabular Editor, the following message appears clearly. This means it’s not possible to use functions in Tabular Editor without realizing it, which could potentially cause data corruption.
Conclusion
Since I spend a lot of time editing Tabular models, I’ve been familiar with Tabular Editor for a long time and actually use it every day. So I think the addition of the ability to edit Power BI datasets with Tabular Editor is a really great development. I see the ability to edit datasets from powerbi.com as a major advantage in particular. Since you’re only changing the metadata, this works a lot faster and more efficiently.
