Documentation · Getting started

Quickstart

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

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

Estimated time

5 minutes, starting from a .pbix or .pbit on disk.

Prerequisites #

  • Windows 10 (21H2+) or Windows 11, 64-bit
  • A Power BI .pbix or .pbit file on disk
  • Daxlate installed. See Install & activate

Open a file #

Launch Daxlate. The Welcome screen lists the files you’ve opened recently. Click Open file… (or Ctrl+O) to browse for a .pbix or .pbit, or pick one from Recent files.

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

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). 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 #