Bravo: Your New Favorite Power BI External Tool Buddy

Feb 2

(link to YouTube video at the bottom!)

If you’ve been following along in my Power BI external tools series, you’ve seen some “heavy hitters” so far. Tools that can get deep into model engineering, dependencies, and performance tuning.

Bravo for Power BI isn’t trying to be that.

Bravo is lighter, simpler, and honestly, that’s why it’s so useful. It’s one of those tools you keep around because it helps you knock out a handful of common tasks fast—without spinning up a bunch of extra steps.

Bravo is built by SQLBI, and the core features line up exactly with what they advertise publicly: Analyze Models, Format DAX, Manage Dates, and Export Data.

Let’s walk through how to use it.

Installing and launching Bravo

Download the latest here: https://www.sqlbi.com/tools/bravo-for-power-bi/

If you’ve installed Bravo properly, it shows up in the External Tools ribbon inside Microsoft Power BI Desktop (which is the smoothest way to use it). External Tools integration is a supported Power BI feature: tools can launch and connect directly to the open model.

One quick clarification (because this gets mixed up a lot):

Bravo can connect to local PBIX/PBIP models easily.
Bravo can also connect to a model in Power BI service when the XMLA endpoint is available/enabled (typically Premium/PPU/Fabric capacity scenarios), but it can only perform read operations.

So: it’s not only local—but local is definitely the most common workflow.

1) Analyze Model: quick, high-level model insight

When Bravo opens, it starts you with a simple model overview: dataset size, column counts, and a quick sense of where the “weight” is in your model (largest tables/columns). This matches Bravo’s stated purpose: quickly identifying expensive objects and giving a lightweight model analysis view.

A couple practical uses:

Spot columns/tables that are unusually large (great first clue when a model feels bloated)
Identify columns Bravo considers “unreferenced” within the model (useful for local cleanup)

One important nuance (and you already called this out in your video): in a true “master semantic model” scenario with downstream thin reports, a local-only analysis can’t see downstream usage. That’s where tenant-aware tooling like Measure Killer Enterprise (or service connectivity + governance) helps more.

2) Format DAX: fast cleanup for readability

Bravo’s DAX formatting is powered by SQLBI’s DAX Formatter service.

The practical value here is speed:

It can scan measures and tell you which ones don’t match its formatting rules. Sometimes it’s overkill, but helpful nonetheless.
You can preview the “before vs after” and batch-format selected measures.

This is especially handy when:

you inherit someone else’s model where formatting is inconsistent
you’re standardizing a team model and want everyone reading the same style

Take it or leave it, but consistency is what makes large models maintainable.

3) Manage Dates: quick date table + optional time intelligence generation

Bravo’s Manage Dates feature does two big things:

Generates a date table (without you writing the DAX)
Optionally generates time intelligence measures off a selected “base measure”

That’s exactly how SQLBI describes it: create a Date table, relate it, and apply time intelligence functions to measures.

Why it’s useful (even if it’s not your long-term approach)

A “standard date table” strategy (dataflow/shared artifact or reusable M/standard database table) is usually the better enterprise path.

But Bravo shines for:

quick prototypes
smaller models
training/demo files
“I need a working calendar table right now” moments

Fiscal year support

Bravo can generate fiscal calendars by letting you set the first month of the fiscal year—exactly the kind of practical option that’s perfect for orgs that don’t follow Jan–Dec.

Time intelligence generation

Bravo’s time intelligence feature is best viewed as:

a learning aid if you’re newer to time intelligence
a quick starter pack if you’re prototyping
not necessarily the “final architecture” if you’re using calculation groups/UDFs/standardized patterns

It can generate a lot of measures quickly—which can be both helpful and a little… overwhelming.

4) Export Data: the feature that’s deceptively powerful

This is the one that wins hearts fast.

Bravo can export tables to Microsoft Excel or CSV, and it works even in scenarios where you’re connected live—so you’re not forced into writing a DAX query just to grab a table extract.

A few “real rules” worth knowing (and these are straight from SQLBI’s Bravo docs):

Excel export: one worksheet per table, limit of 1,000,000 rows per worksheet (tables over that show a warning).
CSV export: can export the full content of larger tables (no worksheet row limit).

That row-limit warning matters for exactly the reason you mentioned: you don’t want someone analyzing an incomplete dataset in Excel and drawing confident conclusions.

Also worth noting: Power BI’s native export limits (from visuals/service) can be much lower depending on scenario, which is why tools like Bravo become a practical workaround in real workflows.

Dark mode

Bravo supports theme switching, including dark mode—small detail, but it does make the tool feel nicer to live in. (And I respect the dark-mode website move.)