Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 347-348

Successful Semantic Modelling for Power BI

Great reports start with great models—and great models are designed, optimised, and proven. In this full‑day, hands‑on workshop you’ll learn how to build Power BI semantic models that stay fast as they grow. We’ll begin with modelling fundamentals and quickly move into the strategies that separate good solutions from great ones: storage mode choices that scale, optimisation techniques that stick, and monitoring practices that keep you fast in production.

You’ll practise applying aggregations, hybrid tables, split columns, and data partitioning to tame large datasets. We’ll demystify distinct‑count at scale (both via data modelling and aggregation design), and you’ll blueprint models around common DAX patterns—period comparisons, ranking, and child‑to‑parent ratios—so they’re robust and repeatable. You’ll learn a pragmatic approach to diagnosing slow visuals and validating improvements with load testing using Microsoft Fabric (plus alternative options).

Finally, we’ll make your model Copilot‑ready with natural‑language semantics, synonyms, and well‑named artifacts; and you’ll operationalise performance with VertiPaq Analyzer, Log Analytics, Capacity Metrics, and BPA. Along the way, you’ll work with the right tools for the job—Power BI Desktop, XMLA, TMDL/TMSL, and Semantic Link / Semantic Link Labs—to design, optimise, and prove your model end‑to‑end. You’ll leave with a tested performance playbook and reusable assets you can apply immediately.

Who should attend? BI developers, data modellers, analytics engineers, and Power BI admins who already know basic DAX/modeling and want to ship faster reports, scale to bigger data, and prepare for Copilot. What you’ll be able to do after this workshop • Pick the right storage mode and partitioning strategy for your data size, refresh cadence, and SLA. • Implement aggregations and hybrid tables that measurably reduce query time. • Model distinct‑count accurately and efficiently, avoiding common pitfalls. • Design for common DAX patterns (period comparisons, ranking, child‑to‑parent ratios) with predictable performance. • Diagnose and fix slow visuals using a repeatable triage and tuning approach. • Load‑test and monitor models using Fabric, VertiPaq Analyzer, Log Analytics, Capacity Metrics, and BPA. Optimise for Copilot with natural‑language friendly semantics, synonyms, and artefact naming.

Wednesday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 340-342

Beginners BI for the Absolute Beginner

Power BI is considered by many to be THE tool for analyzing and visualizing your data. In addition, it is designed to allow power users to easily generate stunning, interactive and insightful reports and dashboards. This session is designed to introduce you to Power BI.

Here’s some of what we’ll cover: Using the Power BI Desktop app Using the Power BI service Connecting to a variety of common data sources “Transforming”/cleaning up your data Creating visualizations Creating Dashboards Sharing your Power BI reports and Dashboards A brief introduction to the DAX language (time permitting)

If you have used Excel in the past, you’ll likely have no problem learning to use Power BI. Get started now with Power BI and take your data visualizations to the next level!

Wednesday 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM · Room 340-342

Deep Dive on Power BI, Teams and SharePoint

Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Power BI can work very well together. SharePoint can be a data source (lists), a container for data files (Excel. CSV etc in libraries), and as a dashboarding platform (pages). Teams can be a complete front end for Power BI, and host content contextually.

This demo rich session will explore all of these scenarios in great depth. SharePoint data can be finicky to retrieve, and this session will show examples and suggest a few best practices for doing so. In addition, connecting Power BI to SharePoint opens up a whole new world for Excel. If it can be done with Power BI, SharePoint and Teams, this session will show you how.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 340-342

Basics of connecting REST APIs to Power BI

Automated refreshes are critical to the success of many reporting solutions. Most developers prefer connecting to databases or data warehouses where they have control over the resource allocation and transformation of the data all before it reaches Power BI. But what happens when you do not have direct access to the database? What happens if the data is hosted by a 3rd party cloud platform? What if you ask for a way to get the data and they send you documentation on their APIs and say good luck?

If you have asked these questions, then this session is designed specifically for you. We will walk you through the basics of understanding API documentation and show you how to connect with the Web connector in Power BI. We will also cover some of the basic transformations you can perform to make your queries more efficient and highlight some of the blockers you might encounter. We will even build a function with an API and apply it to a dataset.

At the end of this session, you will feel comfortable using REST APIs as a data source and building connections using best practices.

Wednesday 3:50 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 340-342

Incorporating Power BI in Daily Collaboration

Creating Power BI reports is only the first step in enabling data-driven decisions in your organization. Once the reports are created, ensuring they are regularly seen and acted upon is just as important. How do report authors make sure their organization is gaining insights using the reports they are creating? How can we meet information workers where they are collaborating to empower them and communicate our data stories?

In this session, Patrick and Daniel will bring real-world, ‘from the field’ examples on creating useful reports that are consumed in the flow of your work. See examples of how organizations enable report utilization where users collaborate, in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 Apps. Learn how to use Power BI in Office applications, including Excel and PowerPoint, to ensure easy access for information workers. If you create reports or know that your organization should be making data informed decision, this session is for you!

Wednesday 3:50 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 347-348

Visualize Without Limits: AI-Powered Custom Visuals for the No-Code Era

Creating custom visuals used to be slow and complex. In this session, see how modern AI tools and the Power BI Visuals SDK turn that challenge into a fast, approachable process. Learn step-by-step techniques to build, customise, and ship visuals—quickly and confidently

Thursday 9:50 AM - 10:10 AM · Solution Studio

Master Data Light with Clarity Databook:

Launch Power BI transformations that work. We know BI reporting has two hard-to-crack dependencies: clean data on the back-end and governed customization on the front-end.

Clarity Databook takes the pain out of keeping your data consistent. Think of it as data management without the enterprise price tag or the six-month implementation. Clean up your data where it starts

1. Give non-technical users a safe way to manage reference data with table creation, form input and access
2. Data security at scale with control access at the row, object, or role level
3. Custom hierarchies on the fly: shared across your organization instantly

Clarity Reportbook is a Power BI enhancement that simplifies building and distributing presentations by customizing and grouping the reports you already have. Your data can be fit for purpose

1. One click away: enable fast customization to help owners, builders and users
2. Filter once, explore everywhere with global filters across pages and workspaces
3. Cross workspace app building: a single dashboard from multiple workspace domains without the complexity
4. Snapshot reports for key moments to freeze and capture a point-in-time view and push it straight to PowerPoint

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 340-342

Faster Power BI Reports

This session will review the areas of performance problems and helpful tools. From data refreshes to model calculations and visual rendering to data model design, performance tuning is vital to keep the attention of a report user. More than 5 or 6 seconds for a refresh can drive someone to not use a report. There are many ways to handle tuning, but it should start in the design. This is not always the case, so internal and external tools are there to guide the current developer. We will talk about query folding, minimizing data loaded as well seeing the difference between the storage and formula engines. Come join me for tuning Power BI reports and the data models.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 337-339

Debug DAX Like a PRO

Phil will walk you through the techniques used by the Power BI team when debugging and optimising DAX in large enterprise models. These equally apply for small and medium size models. Come away knowing how to identify and speed up slow running DAX calculations.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 335-336

Practical Magic: Power BI secrets for development & adoption that scale from start-ups to Microsoft

This session organizes hard-won lessons into two lenses. Adoption covers the technical decisions that determine whether users embrace what you build: performance, agility, reliability, and write-back. Scalability covers the back-end architecture that lets it grow without breaking: security, master data, and refresh cadence. For each area, we use a problem-and-solution framework grounded in real deployments, including the post-launch surprises nobody warns you about, from user friction and silent data drift to entity inclusion after an acquisition.

Thursday 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM · Room 340-342

Power BI Gotchas - Dan's Dirty Dozen

In this session you will get some insights into the Power BI gotchas that I have seen over the years. I will highlight a dozen of what I would call "what not to do" or shall we say "dirty" items. I have had an opportunity over the years to work with some of the largest customers of Power BI in the world and you might be surprised what comes up sometimes;)

We will cover items around data model development, DAX, and report design for the things to be aware of and go over how to avoid and fix these things when developing Power BI models and reports that I feel should be avoided.

The dozen items that will be covered are just a glimpse into the report development of "what not to do" items at least in my opinion, I am sure you have seen your fair share as well and would love to hear what others have come across or potentially done too:)

Thursday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 340-342

Source Control with Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

The wait is over. It is now possible to integrate both Power BI Desktop and Microsoft Fabric workspaces with GIT repositories to provide a full set of CI/CD capabilities for Power BI reports. This session will cover exactly how this works so that you can begin to take advantage of this capability now. We'll cover what is possible, and what is currently not possible, and explain the difference between the GIT integration in Power BI Desktop, and in Microsoft Fabric workspace.

If you're part of a team that works with Power BI, you won't want to miss this.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 340-342

Making Your Power BI Teams More Analytic

You spend all day helping your customers be more analytical—so why not apply the same approach to running your data analytics teams? In this session, I'll show you how to test and track the quality of your team's Power BI development. By leveraging tools like Tabular Editor 2, PBI Inspector, Azure DevOps, OneLake, Fabric, and PBIP, you'll gain actionable insights to improve the quality of the semantic models and reports your team manages.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 340-342

Avoiding the "Grey Box of Death": Automatically Checking For Broken Visuals in Power BI

Have you ever updated a semantic model/dataset and didn't realize it broke a visual in a Power BI report? Have you ever seen that "grey box of death" (or your customers call you about it) after making an update to Power BI? In this session, I demonstrate a way to combine Microsoft Playwright and Azure DevOps to automatically test for broken visuals and notify you about those issues.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 340-342

Power BI Model and Report Optimization Tips

Creating tabular data models and reports is easy with tools like Power BI Desktop. You can build and deploy models and reports really quick, but are they optimized? Is the model and report designed efficiently and is the DAX code in the model set up in a way that it will continue to perform well as the data volumes and number of users increase over time.

In this session we will explore the basic steps you should take as you build out your tabular data models and discuss some best practices in designing the model as well as report to avoid potential pitfalls. We will look at the tools you can use to evaluate and test your models and reports as you build them so that you will know how to use them.

After this session you will have an understanding of how to review and evaluate your tabular models and reports to follow best practices for implementation and deployment.