Microsoft's February 2026 Power BI update included four deprecation announcements. Most teams won't see them until something breaks — because that's how Power BI deprecations tend to work. No warning inside the product. No banner on your dashboard. Just stale data, a confused stakeholder, and a Monday morning incident ticket.
This post covers all four, in order of urgency. All information is sourced directly from Microsoft's official February 2026 feature summary and product documentation.
Deadlines at a Glance
| What's breaking | Key deadline | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy Excel/CSV import — no new models | May 31, 2026 | Medium |
| Legacy Excel/CSV import — existing models stop refreshing | July 31, 2026 | High |
| Legacy Excel/CSV import — reports fail to open entirely | August 31, 2026 | Critical |
| Scorecard hierarchies and heatmap view removed | April 15, 2026 | Medium |
| Simba Vertica ODBC driver — deprecation started | February 2026 | Active now |
| SCOM management packs for SSRS/PBIRS/SSAS | January 2027 | Low |
1. Legacy Excel and CSV Import — The Sneaky One (Deadline: July 31 / August 31, 2026)
This is the most dangerous deprecation on the list because the affected reports are invisible until they break.
Years ago, Power BI Service had a simple browser-based import: go to Create, upload an Excel or CSV file directly, done. No Power BI Desktop required, no pipeline, no gateway. It was the quick-and-dirty path to getting a spreadsheet into a dashboard, and a significant number of reports were built this way — especially by non-technical users who just needed something fast.
Microsoft is now retiring that import path in three stages:
- May 31, 2026: You can no longer create new semantic models using the legacy import experience
- July 31, 2026: Existing semantic models created this way stop refreshing. Reports still open, but data goes stale with no warning
- August 31, 2026: Reports built on legacy models fail to open entirely and display an error message
The July 31 date is the one that will catch teams off guard. Dashboards will appear to work — they'll load, they'll show data — but the numbers will be frozen as of the last successful refresh. Someone will eventually notice the figures look wrong. That investigation takes time, and by then the August 31 hard cutoff may already be close.
How to check if you're affected:
The easiest manual check: go into Power BI Service and look at your semantic models. If a model can't be edited in the browser, can't be downloaded, and has no scheduled refresh option — it was created using the legacy import experience and it's affected.
For a full inventory, Microsoft provides a Power BI REST API check: query your datasets and inspect the ContentProviderType property. Legacy import models return specific values that identify them as affected. Your Power BI admin can run this across the entire tenant.
The fix:
Open Power BI Desktop. Connect to the same Excel or CSV file using Get Data. Publish the new semantic model to the Service. Rebind the affected reports. The underlying data doesn't change — you're just rebuilding the connection through a supported path.
Do this before July 31. Don't wait for the August 31 hard stop.
2. Scorecard Hierarchies and Heatmap View — Closest Deadline (April 15, 2026)
This one has the tightest deadline: April 15, 2026 — less than four weeks away.
Power BI Scorecards have a Hierarchies feature that lets you define multi-level structures — by region, division, team — and automatically generate filtered scorecard views for each slice. The Heatmap view, which was tied to hierarchies, is also being removed.
Scorecards themselves are not going away. Goals, tracking, and standard scorecard functionality are unaffected. Only the hierarchical navigation and heatmap view are being removed.
The practical question: does anyone in your organization actually use Scorecard hierarchies for KPI trees or OKR-style structures? If yes, those views disappear on April 15 with no replacement. If nobody uses them, this is a non-event.
What to do this week: Pull up your Scorecards and check whether hierarchies are configured. Ask the stakeholders who own them whether the hierarchical navigation is part of their workflow. If it is, figure out an alternative structure before the deadline — not after.
3. Simba Vertica ODBC Driver — Already Breaking (Started February 2026)
This one isn't upcoming — it started in February 2026 and new connections may already be failing.
If your Power BI environment connects to a Vertica database and you're using the Simba Vertica ODBC Driver, that driver is now deprecated. Microsoft is moving to the official Vertica ODBC driver.
How to check: Open your gateway data source settings. If you see Simba Vertica ODBC Driver listed anywhere, that connection is on a deprecated path. Swap it for the official Vertica ODBC driver before refresh failures become a support ticket.
Most organizations don't use Vertica, so this is a narrow-impact item. But if you do, it's already active.
4. SCOM Management Packs for SSRS/PBIRS/SSAS — January 2027, Plan Now
Microsoft has announced the deprecation of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) management packs for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Power BI Report Server (PBIRS), and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). These packs will no longer be supported after January 2027, and no future updates are planned — including compatibility with SQL Server 2025 or SCOM 2025.
The recommended replacement is Azure Monitor combined with Azure Arc and Log Analytics.
This is the least urgent item on the list, but January 2027 will arrive faster than infrastructure teams expect if they don't start planning now. Flag this with your infrastructure or IT ops team today so it's in the queue, not a December panic.
Three Things to Check Today
If you want to act on this post right now:
1. Audit your legacy Excel/CSV semantic models. Look for models in Power BI Service with no edit, download, or scheduled refresh option. Any model with those characteristics was built the old way and is on the July/August deprecation path.
2. Check your gateway connections for Simba Vertica. If Vertica is anywhere in your data stack, open gateway settings and look for the Simba driver. Swap it now — this deprecation is already live.
3. Ask whether anyone uses Scorecard hierarchies. You have until April 15. If you don't know the answer, find out this week.
The Real Cost of Keeping Power BI Running
If you've read this far, you're probably the person in your organization who does this work. It's worth stepping back and looking at the cumulative picture — not to make a case for switching, but because this is a cost that rarely gets measured explicitly.
In the last 12 months alone:
- April 2025: Power BI Pro jumped 40% ($10 → $14/user). Premium Per User increased 20%. No grandfathering.
- 2024–2025: Microsoft retired legacy Premium capacity SKUs (P1, P2, P3) and began forcing migration to Microsoft Fabric. For organizations on Premium, the next renewal requires a platform transition — not just a price negotiation.
- February 2026: Four deprecations requiring active admin remediation, with deadlines ranging from weeks to months. At least one (legacy Excel/CSV import) will silently break reports if nobody catches it.
Each of these is manageable in isolation. Together, they represent a recurring operations and maintenance cost that typically doesn't appear in the per-seat license number your finance team sees.
The admin hours spent auditing semantic models, managing gateway driver transitions, planning Fabric migrations, and fielding "why is this dashboard wrong" questions from stakeholders — that's real labor cost on top of the subscription fee.
This isn't an argument to switch. If Power BI is deeply embedded in your Microsoft ecosystem, if your analysts live in Power BI Desktop daily, if Copilot and Fabric are genuinely on your roadmap — the switching cost is high and the tool is delivering value. Stay.
But if you're honest and a meaningful portion of your Power BI reports are viewer-only dashboards, department-level KPIs, or client-facing outputs that don't need DAX modeling or Fabric integration — those reports don't have to live in Power BI. They could live in a simpler tool, at a fraction of the per-seat cost, with less to break every February.
That's not a full migration. It's the right tool for the right job. Keep Power BI for the analysts who need it. Move the viewer-heavy, operationally-simple reporting somewhere it doesn't require a quarterly maintenance window.
If that conversation is worth having in your organization, our Power BI alternatives post covers the options — including where Power BI is still the right answer. And if you want to see what a simpler model looks like in practice, DashboardFox offers a free trial — no credit card, no sales call, connect to the same databases you're using today.