Strategically, I've been working on Deneb 2.0 for a long time now; almost the last two years in some form or another (including starting over twice 😅). I've wanted to solve a lot of long-awaited requests and add new functionality that I think is valuable for development and the user experience, while ensuring we can move the existing visual over to a new version with no friction for existing users.

It's been a long road, but finally, we can start beta testing!

As usual, once we submit to AppSource, it gets really difficult to make changes at pace without affecting all of our users globally, so this is a critical time to get as much testing and validation as possible before we submit. And we can't do that without your help.

Sentence templates for tooltips were introduced to Power BI in June 2026. These allow you to add free text to the standard tooltip, using brace-enclosed tokens to denote where field values should be inserted, e.g.:

Total {Product} sales = {$ Sales}

Because Deneb delegates tooltip display back to Power BI, sentence templates work with Deneb visuals as well, but some setup is required to ensure the fields you want to reference are available. This post walks through the mechanics, the main gotcha, and some tricks for surfacing information from your specification in your sentences.

Deneb 1.9 has passed AppSource certification and is on its way to your reports! This release is the result of extensive refactoring and optimization work, delivering meaningful performance improvements while keeping everything you rely on working exactly as it should.

ETA is (approximately) 26th March 2026 for the new version to be fully deployed to your reports, but this may vary based on location, so it will be helpful to read further and determine if any additional preparation is needed on your end to ensure a smooth transition.

Happy New Year! 🎉 Deneb 1.9 represents a significant step in preparing the codebase for future development, bringing substantial performance improvements and enhanced stability. Before we submit to AppSource, we need your help to validate this release with real-world use cases and ensure that it meets the high standards our community expects.

It's been a quiet year so far in terms of what's been coming out, but I wanted to provide an update on progress, as well as what's happening next.

Version 1.8 is a maintenance update, which brings Deneb up to the latest Microsoft APIs and certification standards and updates the current Vega and Vega-Lite runtimes. It also prepares the v1 codebase for the end of feature development and long-term service continuity, while addressing several minor but long-standing bugs.

We're excited to introduce a brand-new sample workbook designed to help you get started with Deneb and Vega-Lite for Power BI. Inside, you'll find practical learning materials, a selection official Vega datasets, and various chart types to help you dive straight into the world of Deneb and the powerful grammar of graphics behind Vega and Vega-Lite.

I've become smitten with this stacked bar chart alternative, as recently showcased on the Flerlage Twins blog. This article is a brilliant insight into a collaborative process between Sebastine Amede, Darragh Murray and Kevin, with a further spotlight on folks who have inspired their final design. It's a really brilliant way of keeping the part-to-whole idea of a stacked bar chart, while also making the individual segments much easier to compare.

As always, when I see cool things (and because I enjoy using the tooling as well as developing it), I wonder how easy they might be to replicate in Power BI using Deneb. I thought it would be a fun exercise to try and replicate the example from the blog post using Vega-Lite. Fortunately, Vega-Lite has multiple encoding channels along each direction for Cartesian plots, which makes it a fairly straightforward process.

It's a wonderful time of the year when I look over community contributions for my membership in the Microsoft MVP program. As some of this includes looking at how Deneb is doing, I thought it'd also be a good time to provide an update on Deneb's usage and a few bits about what's been happening lately.

1.7.2 is the next minor update that fixes initial issues observed in the 1.7 release. As usual, the standalone build is available now, and the AppSource version is currently undergoing certification.