May 6, 2025

Eurovision with Fabric: Part 1

With Eurovision 2025 only a few weeks away I thought it was time for me to finish some experimenting I had started last year around looking into bringing Eurovision data into Fabric. See what insights we can gain, and maybe if we can predict the winner!

The Plan

As with any event like Eurovision there is a wide range of possible data sources, in order to get a mix of data I decided to start with comparing data from the official music videos on Youtube with the results of the previous contests. This included both simple statistics such as views and likes on each video but also the sentiment on a sample of the comments using some of the AI functions built into Fabric.

March 5, 2025

How to split text by a non-breaking space in Power Query

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.

February 11, 2025

Enabling search for hugo blogs hosted on Azure Static Web Apps

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.

December 12, 2022

How to find any function in Power Query

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.

April 3, 2022

Fabric and Power BI ID Reference

This reference contains instructions on how to find the relevant Id within Power BI and Fabric for use within the REST API.

Workspace Id
Item Id
App Id
Gateway Id
Datasource Id

Workspace Id

Navigate via your browser to the workspace, the URL will be in the format

https://app.fabric.microsoft.com/groups/{Workspace Id} Copy the group id from the URL making sure to remove any “/” at the end or beginning

Item Id

Navigate to the item within its workspace, the URL will be in the format

November 20, 2021

Why Power BI ids are useful

What even is an id?

The Power BI service is build up of many artifacts, 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 artifacts have in common is that the Power BI service uses globally unique identifiers, also known as a universally unique identifier, [GUID] to manage them.

September 20, 2019

London Power BI User Group September 2019

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.

May 31, 2019

Replacing background images in Power BI easily

Have you ever had to update the background image on a report with a lot of pages? Perhaps due to a corporate rebrand, or maybe you no longer like yellow. Whatever the reason, changing the background image on a bunch of pages at once is no fun task. However, there is an easier way which I will go into but first some background info, pun intended.

A fact that I feel is often under appreciated is the fact that Power BI files are in fact zipped archive files. This means you can unzip these files just by renaming the file extension and using a tool like windows explorer or 7zip. I believe this is partly how tools like the the Power BI helper work, but that is just speculation on my part.

May 27, 2019

Reporting on Analysis Services metadata using Power BI

Analysis services has a series of what are called Data Management Views, which are essentially a way of seeing a bunch of meta data about your analysis services instance. With DMVs you can see a whole host of information such as activity, memory usage, active users, and more. However, to solve the issues I often come across the most useful DMVs are around the columns, measures, and tables that exist in the model. While you can query these DMVs through a tool like SSMS with SQL. Viewing these through Power BI can make the data exploration more interactive.

The four DMVs that are useful for this are called TMSCHEMA_TABLES, TMSCHEMA_RELATIONSHIPS, TMSCHEMA_COLUMNS, and TMSCHEMA_MEASURES. Combined all of these let you see all tables, fields, relationships, and measures within the model. To demonstrate this I have built a Power BI Report that uses all of these to show information around an Adventure Works DW model.

May 26, 2019

How to get Donut Charts inside tables in Power BI using SVG

When Microsoft enabled the ability for measures to have a data category such as image or web URL back in August of 2018. Quite a few people started using this to show dynamic images such as sparklines or KPIs. In this post I am going to built on these to create donut charts that can be embedded within Power BI Tables/Matrices using the same technique.