Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room S104a

A Beginner’s Guide to Power BI for SharePoint Users

NOTE: YOU WILL NEED A COMPUTER WITH THE LATEST VERSION OF POWER BI DESKTOP INSTALLED PRIOR TO WORKSHOP TIME. THIS IS A HANDS ON WORKSHOP.

Need to create stunning dashboards from your SharePoint data?

Yes you do!

In this workshop, we’ll show you: • How should I approach my BI need? • What things should be considered when creating dashboards? • What are the best practices? • How much is this going to cost me to license? • What security aspects should concern me?

Who should take this course: If your company uses Office 365 or SharePoint 2013/2016 and you are a: • Manager • Business Analyst • Power User • SharePoint Administrator • Consultant

If you work in these areas, you will see value: • Marketing • Information Technology • Finance • Sales • Social Media

The class assumes no prior knowledge of Power BI and Data Concepts.

What is required for this class: Install Microsoft Power BI Desktop on your laptop (recommended but not required) We'll provide an Office 365 site for you to use for exercises

In this workshop you will: • Learn how to create Production Dashboards using Power BI, from SharePoint list and document library data • How to use Power BI in a multitude of situations, including ad hoc analysis and the creation of formal dashboard. • Learn the Power BI components: Power BI Desktop, PowerBI.com, Power BI mobile applications and how they can be used with Office 365 and SharePoint • Receive an introduction into the core functions of Power BI; Data extraction, loading and transformation using Power Query Formula Language (“M”) and DAX. • Receive some guidelines on how to extract Project data in fast manner. • Discover some data modeling practices that will ensure you have maximum flexibility in analysis. You'll also learn some visualization best practices to ensure you can tell your digital story effectively • Learn best practices for maintaining content with your organization

This workshop provides an end to end view of Power BI for Project reporting, so that you are able to use Power BI immediately for your needs.

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room S103bc

Microsoft Fabric - A Whole New World for Power BI

Microsoft Fabric is the Brave New World of Microsoft Analytics. Fabric brings together not only Power BI, but all sorts of tools from the Microsoft data platform, including Data Factory, Synapse Data Warehouse, Azure Data Explorer, Spark, Azure Data Lake Gen 2, and more. It also introduces new capabilities such as OneLake, Lake Houses, Databases, and Real Time Dashboards. The choices of tools have totally exploded.

This all day tutorial will explore all of the different components of Microsoft Fabric, and what they bring to the table, particularly from the perspective of a Power BI user. We will walk through its architecture, and the user interface working through a number of examples as we go. Finally, we will cover off how it is licensed, and a whole host of other miscellaneous topics including source control, and integration with other systems. .

This tutorial consists of a mix of theory and demonstrations, with emphasis on the demonstrations using real world data. It is designed for the beginner and the novice user, but even advanced users will find some nuggets of new information. Fabric is a fast moving, and ever-changing product, and this tutorial is constantly updated to reflect that.

Above all we encourage questions and dialog. We can't answer your questions if you don't bring them, so please come armed! Feel free to even bring us data and we can work through any reporting challenges that you may have. If you want to get exposed to Microsoft Fabric, this is certainly a session for you.

Wednesday 9:50 AM - 11:00 AM · Room S103bc

Power 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 11:30 AM - 12:40 PM · Room S103bc

Unraveling Microsoft Fabric for the Power BI User

Are you a Power BI developer? Have you heard about Microsoft Fabric? What are all of these new "Data" experiences - Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehousing, oh my and other items such as Activator and Real-Time Intelligence? Wow! Where did Power BI go?

In this session we will go under the covers and unravel the Microsoft Fabric to help educate Power BI developers to provide an overview of the new capabilities available and provide some guidance on how to get started and skilled up on using experiences like Dataflows Gen2 and Direct Lake mode for Power BI.

Come and learn about Microsoft Fabric and looking forward to answering any questions you might have as well as hear your feedback!

Wednesday 1:40 PM - 2:50 PM · Room S103bc

Driving Productivity with Power BI and M365

Discover what's new and upcoming for Power BI integration with M365 - with insights from the Power BI product team! Learn how to drive productivity and deepen your organization's data-driven culture. In this session we will walk through what's available in Power BI today, what's on the roadmap, and how you can use these features to increase efficiency and improve decision making!

Wednesday 3:30 PM - 4:40 PM · Room S103bc

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.

Thursday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room S103bc

From Hocus Pocus to Focus: Contextualize Your Power BI Data

Numbers alone rarely tell the whole story. When presenting a Power BI report, especially in leadership meetings, you often need to provide additional context to explain unexpected spikes, dips, or trends. Sometimes new information is shared during the meeting that helps clarify what’s really going on. In these moments, it's essential to have a way to both show and capture that context directly in the report.

In this session, you’ll learn a variety of enchanting ways to capture and showcase these all-important details. Whether you're brewing up annotations with a simple Excel file, conjuring context with a Power App, whispering insights with Power BI’s commenting feature, or summoning third-party visuals, we've got a spell for that. And of course, we'll reveal the latest charm in the spellbook: translytical task flows.

By the end of this session, you’ll be equipped with the tools and tricks to banish confusion and conjure clarity, ensuring your audience gets the full story, not just the numbers.

Thursday 10:40 AM - 11:50 AM · Room S103bc

Querying SharePoint Data in Power BI - Options & Performance

Do you rely on SharePoint data for building your Power BI reports? Do you find dataset refreshes with SharePoint are exceedingly slow? If so, in this session I offer a review of the ways to connect to SharePoint within Power BI and techniques to improve refresh times.

Thursday 12:50 PM - 2:00 PM · Room S103bc

There's No Time Like the Present - Reducing Latency in Power BI with Fabric

Power BI offers many ways to keep data fresh, but what if refreshes aren’t enough? This session explores real‑time and near‑real‑time options—from DirectQuery, aggregations, and hybrid tables to Fabric features like Direct Lake and Real‑Time Intelligence—plus design tips and trade‑offs to watch for.

Thursday 2:10 PM - 3:20 PM · Room S103bc

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.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room S103bc

Why Power BI Copilot Works (and When It Doesn’t)

Copilot isn’t random—your data just needs to be AI‑ready. Learn what actually drives consistent results in Power BI Copilot.

Power BI Copilot can generate insights in seconds—but many users experience inconsistent, confusing, or low‑confidence results. Why does Copilot work well in some reports and struggle in others? This session explores the underlying factors that influence Copilot’s reliability and explains why data and semantic model readiness matters more than prompt phrasing. You’ll gain a clear mental model of how Copilot interprets questions, where inconsistency comes from, and how teams can reduce ambiguity and improve trust across reports. Attendees will leave with practical guidance they can apply immediately to get more consistent, meaningful results from Power BI Copilot.

What You’ll Learn: *How to maximize Copilot’s impact with appropriate preparation.

• How to accelerate discovering insights for data consumers with Copilot.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room S103bc

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:)

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room S103bc

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 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room S103bc

What are Power BI Goals?

In this session, you'll learn about Power BI Metrics and how they can be used in your organization to track the metrics that matter to you.

You'll learn about:

1. Scorecards
2. Goals
3. Check-ins
4. Target and Current values