New Power BI Desktop interface keeps freezing - HELP

[vpatel55]

Hello, since the new ribbon interface was rolled out, my Power BI Desktop Pro is completely unresponsive and keeps freezing. I cannot minimise, maximise, or move the window at all. The ribbon is completely unresponsive. Occassionally, it will randomly unfreeze, only to re-freeze. This is affecting all my reports. I cannot get any work done. This is an issue with PowerBI and not my system, I have the latest Core i7 with 32Gb of system memory on Windows 10. All my other apps are fine. It was working fine before the new interface was rolled out. Any help would be appreciated, particularly on how I can roll this back to the previous version.

[martinhgrosse]

PROPLEM +1
Please, please, please - can we fix this?

[Anonymous]

Please, please, please - can we fix this? (2)

[jdoerner]

A coworker pointed out to me that when it his power bi desktop was frozen pressing ctrl key would unfreeze it for him. I just tried it on mine and it worked. Not sure if everyone else will have the same experience. Still needs a fix but this might help some get by until that day. 

Update: Just did another test. Opened up a pbix that was known to freeze, left it open for 5 minutes, verified it was indeed frozen, then tapped ctrl once and it was back to working normally. 

[nicg]

I'm having the same problem. The entire UI randomly freezes and I was having to kill the application and restart. Thank you @jdoerner for mentioning the ctrl key. That fixes the problem for me as well, until it freezes again, of course.

2.79.5773.0

[chross]

Hey all.  Same is happening to me.  I  just downloaded the latest March release today and it's constantly crashing on me.  It's beyond frustrating that I keep losing work if I do not save every 3 seconds 😞 My colleague sent a complaint to Microsoft Support on March 6th as the same was happening to him.  I don't think they even read our blogs to see that these issues we bring up are global amongst many organizations and not just isolated incidents.  Let me know what any of you find out!!!!

[zelroberic]

I just went to Options -> Preview features and unchecked the Updated ribbon option restarted Power BI and that took care of the problem. Don't need to go back to an older version.  I am using the Mar 2020 version.

[Anonymous]

I've been using the ctrl key hack, hopefully that will continue to work until they fix it. Otherwise I'll disable the ribbon like others have suggested. 

[vpatel55]

Thanks for all the tips and workarounds @Anonymous, @zelroberic and others. The main risk is if you write over your existing PBIX files in the March 2020 format, they then might not open in the February 2020 file format. That is problematic particularly if the workaround no longer works another issue crops up. I use two computers and several times a year, I found that one will not open a file saved from the other until I update. I would just urge caution, unless any new features in March being a greater advantage than this risk.

[Anonymous]

@vpatel55  Good news, i've rolled back to Feb 2020 and i had saved some files with march 2020.  I didn't have any issues opening those files 🙂

[vpatel55]

Thanks for confirming @Anonymous , I know people have built super cool models and I didn't want people to lose work!