Engaging Q&A and Discussion (with Amir Netz) - Microsoft Fabric's CTO !!

DESCRIPTION 📄

Please join Microsoft Fabric's CTO Amir Netz and me as I host this special livestream where we'll have an engaging discussion and audience Q&A on everything Microsoft Fabric. We'll discuss everything from: data and AI, Synapse, Spark/Notebook, OneLake/DirectLake, and what Fabric means for the future of Power BI. Tune in to find out!

GUEST BIO 👤

Amir Netz is a Technical Fellow and the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric is a complete, unified, SaaS data platform that brings together all tools that organizations need to run their data estate. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a unified product, empowering data, and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI.

Before that Amir served as the founder and CTO of Microsoft Power BI.

Used by 98% of the Fortune 500 companies, Power BI is widely recognized as the market’s leading Business Intelligence product, with the fastest growth and the highest usage.

Amir is the leading world expert in BI and Business Analytics technology. The products invented, designed, and developed by Amir have repeatedly defined the business analytics market. In 1997 Amir founded SQL Server Analysis Services, a product that with its ease-of-use and low-cost had democratized the BI industry and quickly became the most popular BI server in the world. Today, Power BI is driving a similar transformation in the Cloud.

The technologies that Amir invented are shipping as part of SQL Server, Excel, and the Microsoft Power Platform. Some of his latest contributions include VertiPaq, Microsoft’s revolutionary in-memory column-oriented data engine that excels at performance and flexibility for data analysis, Q&A – the natural language BI exploration experience, Dataflows – a popular self-service data preparation platform, and the Power BI experience – for interactive ad-hoc data visualization and exploration.

The special designation of “Technical Fellow” is Microsoft’s acknowledgement of the key role a top technical leader plays in driving intentional innovation with broad industry impact. A Technical Fellow's technical vision, expertise and world-class leadership is commensurate with that of a corporate vice president focused on business leadership.

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(Livestream Replay) The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice - with James Bartlett

DESCRIPTION 📄

In recent years, data-driven decision making has become the gold standard for all organizations, and data literacy is more important now than ever before. Organizations large and small must become intimately familiar with their data or risk falling behind the competition and fading into irrelevance. One of the best ways to foster an active, passionate data culture within an organization is to establish a Community of Practice around the technologies the organization uses to process, store, analyze, and consume data.

Join us as we discuss the founding and early stages of The Data Dojo: a Power BI Community of Practice which was established at Des Moines University to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience among faculty and staff interested in analyzing data generated by the various departments and other business units in the organization.

We'll also talk about the founding principles and structure of the Data Dojo, some of the topics we've covered at our workshops, what has gone right, what we could have done better, and what we're planning for the future.

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James D. Bartlett III is a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst and Power BI Administrator at Des Moines University in Iowa, USA. He started working in IT way back in 2002, while he was a student in the Business Administration program at Colorado State University. After graduation, James dabbled in banking, real estate, healthcare, and even had a short stint as a resident DJ at Denver's top nightclub, before finally stumbling upon his true calling in the Business Intelligence field in 2018.

James is a Microsoft Certified Power BI Data Analyst Associate, co-developer of the Business Ops and Power BI Version Control apps on PowerBI.tips, and co-leader of the Iowa Power BI User Group. In his spare time, James enjoys longboarding, playing the guitar, and producing electronic music in his home studio.

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(Livestream Replay) Building Multi-language Reports for Power BI - with Ted Pattinson

DESCRIPTION 📄

Power BI has a history which has made it challenging to build reports that support multiple languages. Fortunately, enhancements to Power BI over the last year have reduced this challenge making it more attainable to Power BI content creators. As an example, Power BI added support for the USERCULTURE function which provides the ability to write measures which implement report label translations dynamically. Power BI enhancements to the report designer now provide more flexibility to bind measures with dynamic translations to visuals and shapes so they can be surfaced on report pages. Furthermore, the recent introduction of Field Parameters in Power BI now offers a far more elegant and efficient strategy to implement data translations.

In this Livestream session, Ted Pattison will discuss how to get started with multi-language report development. Attendees will learn about the three different types of translations involved with multi-language report development as well as the techniques used to implement them. Ted will demonstrate using the Translations Builder utility to automate repetitive localization tasks that would take forever to complete manually. This session will provide content creators using Power BI Desktop with a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together and with a path forward for building multi-language reports in Power BI using a strategy that is reliable, predictable and scalable.

GUEST BIO 👤

Ted Pattison worked as an independent trainer and software developer whose community efforts earned him the Microsoft MVP award for 15 years in a row. Ted joined the Power BI Customer Advisory Team (PBICAT) at Microsoft in 2020 where he provides guidance to enterprise customers and ISVs in several areas including developing with Power BI embedding, programming with the Power BI APIs and building multi-language reports.

Ted is also the creator of Power BI Dev Camp (https://www.powerbidevcamp.net) which provides a monthly webinar geared toward professional software developers working with Power BI, Fabric and the Microsoft Data Platform.

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(Livestream Replay) Connecting API's with Power Query - Not so Low Code? - with Erik Svensen

DESCRIPTION 📄

In this session Erik will demo how you can get data from web api's and how you can ensure that your model can be refreshed in the service.

We will by using real life examples walk through how to connect to different web api's and how different API's have different authentication methods that you will have to understand and master.

We will look at how you can parameterize your queries and only get the data for a specific period or other ways of specifying parameters that the API supports.

In the session you will also learn how to do a POST request to an API.

And YES we will spend a lot of the time in the Power Query Advanced editor.

After the session you should have a good start so that you can connect to the API's that are relevant for you.

GUEST BIO 👤

Erik Svensen is a Microsoft MVP. Erik has been working with the Microsoft BI stack for more than 20 years - starting with out with Excel and Microsoft Query for over 25 years ago. He owns the company CatMan Solution who is now serving over 70+ FMCG suppliers with a Power BI solution that provides the supplier with valuable insights in their performance at store level based on point of sales data provided to them by different retailers. He started the Danish Power BI User group and speaks at conferences and meetups. Another great passion besides Power BI is his collection of Danish contemporary art. And if he finds time he occasionally blogs about Power BI as well.

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Slide Deck Link