Documentation · Getting started

Quickstart

Open a Power BI model, add a culture, ship a translated report in five minutes.

This guide walks through the smallest possible end-to-end workflow: connecting to a running Power BI Desktop instance, adding a French culture, translating a handful of captions, and exporting the result for a translator to finish.

Estimated time

5 minutes, assuming Power BI Desktop is already open with a model.

Prerequisites #

  • Windows 10 (21H2+) or Windows 11, 64-bit
  • Power BI Desktop, with a .pbix open (for live mode), or a .pbix / .pbit file on disk (for file mode)
  • Daxlate installed. See Install & activate

Open a model #

Launch Daxlate. The Welcome screen has two columns: Connect to a running model on the left and Recent files on the right.

  • The left column lists every running Power BI Desktop instance with a model loaded. Each row shows the file name, the local Analysis Services port, and how long it’s been running. Click a row to connect in live mode.
  • The right column lists .pbix / .pbit files you’ve opened recently. Click one to reopen in file mode. The Open file… button (or Ctrl+O) lets you browse for a new file.

If you want to look without risk of writing, tick Open in read-only mode at the bottom before clicking.

No live instances showing?

The Welcome screen polls every 2.5 seconds for running Desktop instances. See Troubleshooting · Port not detected if yours doesn’t appear.

Add a culture #

With a model open, click the Cultures · N button in the grid toolbar (top right). The popup lists every culture currently in the model. Click Add culture… at the bottom and pick fr-FR from the .NET globalization catalog. Confirm.

The Add culture dialog offers two seeding strategies: start empty (default) or copy from an existing culture (the model’s default culture is pre-selected as the source).

The grid now shows a new fr-FR column alongside the existing cultures.

Translate captions #

In the grid toolbar:

  • Set VIEW to Caption to hide description rows.
  • Click the Missing only pill (red dot) to filter the grid down to rows that don’t yet have a translation in the visible cultures.

Click into any empty fr-FR cell and type the translation. The cell gets an accent left-bar and an unsaved-edit dot. The status bar at the bottom shows how many edits are pending.

Save #

Click Save changes in the status bar (or Ctrl+S):

  • Live mode: the change is pushed to TOM on the running Power BI Desktop instance. You still need to do File → Save inside Power BI Desktop to persist it to the .pbix on disk.
  • File mode: the app recompiles the model. A .pbix with a data model is saved as a sibling .pbit (the original .pbix is left untouched; this is a pbi-tools limitation). A .pbit saves in place.

When everything’s clean the status bar shows All changes saved.

Export for translators #

To hand off remaining work to a human translator, use File → Export translations… and pick CSV or XLSX. One file holds every culture as separate columns; the translator fills in the missing cells in Excel and sends it back. Re-import with File → Import translations… and the app previews a diff before applying.

Next steps #