Making The Most Out of The Power Platform

Do you want (some of) your users to be able to refresh the Power BI dataset behind a report, from within that report?
Do you want to be able to edit your data in a Power BI report?
Do you want to refresh your Power BI dataset as soon as the connected dataflow is refreshed?

Now you can! With a combination of Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate.
In this live demo session I will demonstrate the Microsoft Power Platform products working together to create easy, usable, and interactive data solutions.

Power BI Service Administration and Governance – from the trenches

During this table talk Nicky van Vroenhoven, Štěpán Rešl, Nikola Ilic, and Tom Martens will share their experiences in administering and governing the Power BI Service. The service helps our users succeed by getting insights from data to make impactful decisions.

Over the last couple of years, we have learned that being a Power BI Service administrator is much more than just turning on or off the Power BI Admin settings (no matter how vital these settings are).

The focus of this table talk is not only the Admin settings, as we Power BI admins are also impacting the data culture of an organization. We can discuss aspects of sharing data inside and across organizations. But we can also talk about what has to be done to meet the requirements of data governance and compliance rules requirements.

In this session, we will try to answer all the questions you bring to us. We provide the answers based on our experience and what's important to our clients, the organizations we work for, and why this is important. We will back this up with relevant blogs and documentation as much as possible.

A Deep Dive Into The Power BI Direct Lake

The term storage mode in Power BI refers to how tables are stored and how queries will be sent to the data source. In Power BI desktop you can specify the storage mode on a per-table basis. It's important to understand how the different storage modes function and how they can be utilized to meet certain business requirements.

Power BI has had storage modes for quite some time, with Import being the best practice and default mode for the majority of projects.
With Microsoft Fabric, a new mode has been announced: Direct Lake mode.

How does that fit in? It's actually not really a storage mode (because it doesn’t store any data!), but more a connectivity mode.
What are the differences and similarities or the pros and cons to the old storage modes? And do we still need to use those?
What's V-Ordering all about?
What Power BI or Fabric licenses do we need, to use Direct Lake mode?

In this session we will deep dive into the Direct Lake and answer these questions.
This sessions is mainly aimed at Power BI developers, so anyone who works with Power BI Desktop, or people that want to get a better understanding of all the storage modes in Power BI. Some experience with Power BI (Desktop) is assumed, so that you have a basic understanding of how Power BI works: use Power Query to ingest some data, build a data model and create a report.

Tips & Tricks of a Large Scale Power BI (Premium) Implementation

Attendees will walk away with guidelines and practical tips from a real-world implementation of Power BI (Premium) with 750+ users.
Back to September 2016: Power BI is new, shiny and hot. It is the tool of the moment, so people cannot wait to get their hands on it.
Fast forward 6 months, there is more traction within the business, trainings are given and workshops are held. The adoption of Power BI is growing. Some departments already use Power BI very extensively and incorporate it in their day-to-day processes. Due to this quick success there is uncertainty regarding the right support team for incidents and problems.
Because an app workspace creates an Office 365 group with a lot of artifacts behind the scenes, the creation workflow is controlled by IT. Unfortunately this inhibits the end users.
We require more governance, not to further bother the users, but it is essential to stay in control. Responsibilities need to be better aligned between IT and the business. And what to do with Power BI Premium?
Throughout this session we take you along on our Power BI journey, with tips, tricks, do's and don'ts during the implementation of Power BI (Premium) at a financial institute in the Netherlands.
For this session a basic knowledge of Power BI is assumed, there is no deep technical knowledge necessary.

This is a 45 min - one hour session (beginner - intermediate) that can be co-presented with my colleague Jeroen Schalken.

Query Folding in Power BI

Are you working with Power Query, in Excel or Power BI? Have you ever experienced that the importing of data is slower than you expected? In most of those cases, query folding is probably not happening fully optimized.
Query folding is important because it offloads data transformations to the source, instead of performing them in Power Query.
Attend this session to learn how to ensure that you get all the performance improvements possible in your reports.
You will learn how to check if a query (really) folds, how to use the Query Diagnostics feature, and even how to make a Native SQL query fold!
You will also see how (not) folding can hurt performance.

This is an intermediate, one hour technical session. A basic understanding of Power BI Desktop is required because it goes under the cover into Power Query.

A Form, a Flow and a Power BI Streaming Dataset Walk Into a Bar

This is a live demo session that demonstrates the Microsoft Power Platform of products working together to create an interactive data application.

It's good to have some form of interactivity in your presentation. Whether it's by (live) polling your audience, telling a story, asking questions during your presentation or any other way to make your presentation more interactive, doesn't really matter.
The way I started doing this was by firing some questions at the audience after I introduced myself. Although that worked pretty well, I was asking closed questions with a show of hands. I did get a feel of the audience from my perspective so I know on what topics to focus on a little more in my presentation.

But as I work with the Power Platform suite of products I thought it was a good idea to use some of that Power! So in this session I will show you the following:
- Create a form with Microsoft Forms,
- Create a Power Automate flow to get the answers,
- Push them into a Power BI streaming dataset,
- And finally create a Power BI report and dashboard on that dataset to get a live view of the answers of the audience.

Power Platform Better Together: Create a Scoring App with a Live Dashboard

Often during a presentation or workshop, you want to have an interactive quiz.
Maybe you've used Kahoot or any of the other platforms out there, but they rarely integrate well with our other applications. Using the Power Platform, we'll create an interactive quiz that gives you the best of all worlds.

Our goal is to create an app where attendees will answer questions and be awarded points for (partially) correct answers.
We want to have an application where we can enter the name of an attendee and their score. Ideally, we'll be showing the results using that same application so there's no constant switching between the app and the results.
We're going to accomplish this by using 3 of the Power Platform products: Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI.

Join this session to see how to build this solution from scratch!

Write-back with Power Apps in Power BI

Have you ever wondered why you can't edit your data in Power BI like in Excel? Now you can!
Well, not directly in Power BI, but you can accomplish this with a Power App inside a Power BI report.
In this session you will learn how to create a basic Power App and how to use that in the Power Apps visual in a Power BI report. You will learn how to connect Power BI and Power Apps together to update data in a database and display the results in Power BI.
During the session, we will also run through different use cases where this can be brought to practice.
This is an intermediate (Power BI) session, so experience with Power BI is assumed, prior experience with Power Apps is not necessarily needed.

(Back) In Control Of Your Power BI Tenant?

Did you just receive the responsibility for some, or even all, Fabric (formerly known as Power BI) Administrator tasks?
Do you have the privilege, as an IT Admin or Global Administrator, to “also take care of Power BI”?
Do you know your way around Power BI Desktop, but don’t know what happens beyond it, or what has to be managed in the Service?
Do you also not know what the Power Platform (management) truly encompasses?
Do you really think Power BI Premium is the answer to all your performance problems?

If you answer Yes to any of the questions above, this session is for you!
And did you know a Power BI Premium Capacity is not a switch you turn on and just walk away from. It’s like heating tomato soup in the microwave: if you don’t pay attention, it becomes a mess very quickly.

In this session, we will take a look at tasks and components that are part of a Fabric Admin’s daily routine.
– The role of the Fabric Admin
– Tenant settings
– Handling workspaces
– Branding your tenant
– (Premium) Monitoring
– Power Platform Admin Center

When you start applying the tips and tricks of this session, you will get a grip on your Power BI tenant!

First public delivery was at the Dutch Power BI User Day in 2023.