Question

An analytics engineering team wants to store their Power BI reports and semantic models in an Azure DevOps Git repository so that reviewers can see meaningful, line-by-line differences of model and report changes in pull requests. They currently save their work as .pbix files, but reviewers complain that the binary files show no readable diffs. What should the team do to enable text-based diffing while continuing to develop in Power BI Desktop?

Accepted Answer

Save the reports as Power BI project (.pbip) files, which store the report and semantic model as folders of plain-text (TMDL/JSON) definition files that Git can diff.

Answer

Export each report as a .pbit template file and commit the templates to Git instead of the .pbix files.

Answer

Publish the .pbix files to a Fabric workspace and connect the workspace to Git so the binary files are converted automatically.

Answer

Create .pbids connection files for each report and commit those to the repository for version control.