What's new in Tabular Editor 3?

  • 2021-06-01
  • Daniel Otykier

(The following section assumes that you are somewhat familiar with the open-source Tabular Editor 2).

Tabular Editor 3 adds the following features that are not available in the open-source version:

  • UI overhaul
    • Visual Studio-like, fully customizable shell
    • Theming support (dark mode!)
    • Hi-DPI and multi-monitor support
  • New, super-powerful DAX Editor
    • Powered by Scintilla (SciTe, Notepad++, etc.)
    • Many Code Assist features (aka. "IntelliSense")
    • Offline syntax and semantic checking and highlighting
    • Roadmap: Configurable hotkeys and color schemes
    • DAX debugging
  • Full offline metadata analysis with syntax and semantic checking
    • Metadata automatically inferred for calculated objects, without being connected to AS
    • Messages view that displays all DAX errors/warnings and allows you to quickly navigate to the code that has issues
  • Find/replace dialog box
    • Allows you to display all find results in a window to quickly navigate between objects
    • Supports RegEx, backslash expressions and Dynamic LINQ searches
  • Diagram view
    • Easily navigate large models, including only tables that are related to the table you're looking at
    • Easily add/edit relationships
    • Save/load diagrams to files
    • Roadmap: Save/load diagrams to model annotations
  • DAX Scripting
    • Edit multiple measures in a single script
    • Supports editing various measure properties (DisplayFolder, Description, IsHidden, KPIs, etc.) in addition to the DAX expression itself
    • Support for calculated tables and calculated columns
    • Support for calculation groups/items
  • Macro recorder (C# aka. "Advanced Scripting")
    • Scripts can be saved as reusable macros (aka. "custom actions") that are fully customizable with the rest of the UI shell
  • New connected features:
    • Workspace Mode (simultaneously synchronize model metadata to disk AND to analysis services)
    • Table Preview (infinite scrolling on tables in import mode, filtering/sorting supported in both import and DirectQuery mode)
    • DAX Query Editor
    • Pivot Grid view (drag and drop columns/measures from TOM explorer)
    • Async Data Refresh
    • VertiPaq Analyzer (also allows you to import an existing vpax file when working offline)
  • Power Query support
    • Load column metadata from tables that use Power Query partitions
    • Roadmap: Power Query editor with IntelliSenseTM-like features

In addition to the features listed above, Tabular Editor 3 will have full feature parity with Tabular Editor 2.

Next steps