Your first translation

Last updated: July 26, 2026

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, click Open file… (or Ctrl+O) and pick a .pbix or .pbit on disk. The app extracts the model with the bundled pbi-tools and opens it offline, with no Power BI Desktop needed.

If you’ve turned on the optional live mode, you can instead attach to a running Power BI Desktop instance from the Connect to a running model column. See File vs. live mode for when that’s worth it.

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). 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 and the session adopts the .pbit for later saves. A .pbit saves in place.

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

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

If you’re using the optional live mode instead, the change is committed to the running Desktop instance via TOM, and you do File → Save inside Power BI Desktop to persist it to disk.