Quick background first, what are a non-breaking spaces and why would you want to use them?

A non-breaking space is a character which looks the same as a normal space, however it prevents software that is rendering the text from inserting a linebreak where that space is. This is useful if you want to control exactly where text may be moved onto a new line, especially with different sized screens etc. The key point for Power BI and Power Query is that these non-breaking spaces have a different unicode value to the normal space.

I recently migrated this blog from Wordpress to an Azure Static Web App built using Hugo. While getting the basics setup with the Microsoft documentation and other blog posts was not too tricky, adding in a search functionality required some steps which I haven’t seen documented anywhere.

First some background, hugo works by taking your website as you define it pages, articles, etc. then converting it ahead of time to static HTML to be served when people visit the site. This is all handled via Github actions, which are small actions triggered off by certain activities such as pull, push etc. Whenever I push changes back to github the action is triggered and the whole site gets updated.

Have you ever been looking for a function in the Power Query function documentation and been unable to find the function that you can see right there in the M code Power BI has generated for you?

I know I have especially with functions used to access data sources, well did you know there is a built in set of information right within Power Query! All you have to do is create a new blank query and paste this line of M code.

What even is an id?

The Power BI service is build up of many artefacts, some of which you are probably familiar with: reports, dashboards, workspaces, some of which you may not be: dataflows, capacities, gateways etc.
One of the things that all of these artefacts have in common is that the Power BI service uses globally unique identifiers, also known as a universally unique identifier, [GUID] to manage them.

Yesterday I spoke at the London Power BI User group about power query. If you want to view the recording it should be available on skills matter shortly.
You can also access the PowerPoint and Excel files on github.

If you attended the talk thank you so much for attending. If you have any questions you can either post them here or reach out on linkedin.