Version Control for PowerBI with Git

When working on PowerBI projects for a longer time or supporting a customer, version control would be a desireable feature. In many cases PowerBI files are stored on file share or SharePoint. At this moment (August 2023) there is no integrated version control feature in PowerBI Desktop. But we can use featues from different software products to build a version control strategy for PowerBI.

There is a preview feature call “Save as PowerBI project” in PowerBI Desktop. This will split the PowerBI report into multiple files that contain the model definition, the report layout and some more files. Now that we have multiple files in a project folder, one can come up with the idea to put these files under a version control system.

You can use Git as version control system on your local PC or wherever the PowerBI reports are developed. Git has a local repository and can be connected to central repository. In Azure DevOps you can setup projects using Git as version control system. Connect your local PowerBI Git repository with Azure DevOps to manage your PowerBI report development.

Here you can read the original post from Microsoft: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deep-dive-into-power-bi-desktop-developer-mode-preview/

I’ve made a video that shows you how to setup version control and connect PowerBI with DevOps: