Documentation · Getting started

Your first translation

Translate a single caption end-to-end and persist it back to your model.

This walkthrough is one rung up from Quickstart: a single caption, one culture, all the way to a saved model. Use it the first time you touch a real report.

Open the model #

From the Welcome screen, pick how to open the model:

  • Live mode: click a running Power BI Desktop instance in the left column. The app attaches to its local Analysis Services port.
  • File mode: click Open file… (or Ctrl+O) and pick a .pbix / .pbit on disk. The app extracts the model with the bundled pbi-tools and opens it offline.

Live is faster for iterative work. File mode is the right choice when Power BI Desktop isn’t running or you’re working on a model you don’t want to open in Desktop.

Add the culture #

Cultures live as objects in the Tabular model. Adding fr-FR creates a property bag for every translatable string: captions and descriptions on tables, columns, measures, hierarchies, and hierarchy levels.

Click Cultures · N in the grid toolbar, then Add culture…, pick fr-FR, and choose whether to start empty or copy from the model’s default culture. Confirm.

Translate one caption #

Pick a row in the grid (sidebar tree → table → column or measure). The grid shows one row per object with a column per visible culture.

In the fr-FR column, type the French equivalent of the source caption. The cell gets an accent left-bar and an unsaved-edit dot. The status bar at the bottom shows the pending-edit count.

Save and verify #

Click Save changes in the status bar (or Ctrl+S). What happens next depends on the mode:

  • Live mode: the change is committed to the running Power BI Desktop instance via TOM (Model.SaveChanges()). Your .pbix file on disk is not touched; Power BI Desktop owns that file. To persist the translation to disk, do File → Save inside Power BI Desktop.
  • File mode: the app recompiles the model. If you opened a .pbix containing a data model, the save is redirected to a sibling .pbit (e.g. Finance.pbix → Finance.pbit). The original .pbix is left untouched. The session then adopts the .pbit for any subsequent saves.

The status bar flips to All changes saved when the write completes.

Reopen the model in Power BI Desktop. The French caption is now live.