May 16, 2025

How to fix Power Query unknown identifier error

If you have had the following error in Power Query it can be quite annoying to work out what is causing it

Expression.Error: There is an unknown identifier. Did you use the [field] shorthand for a _[field] outside of an 'each' expression?

Normally this error is caused because an each keyword was accidentally deleted from a filter or new column.

_{Normal correct function}

The correct function

_{Erroneous function}

The broken function

So to fix this you need to open the advanced editor and check the Power Query code is not missing an each.

May 11, 2025

Eurovision with Fabric: Part 3

This is the final post of the mini series on Eurovision analysis. If you haven’t read part one or part two I would recommend you read them first.

Orchestration

Before we cover the reporting and analysis, I thought it worth briefly covering how all the notebooks are orchestrated. To control notebook orchestration there are a few different options within Fabric, runMultiple with a DAG, Airflow, or a data pipeline.

There are a few pros and cons for each option, such as cost, easy of setup, etc. For this simple project I went for a data pipeline as it was the easiest to quickly setup. As for the pipeline itself it consists of a few notebook activities linked with dependencies.

May 11, 2025

Eurovision with Fabric: Part 2

This is part of a mini series on analysing Eurovision data with Microsoft Fabric. If you missed part one you can read it here. In part 1 I briefly covered the initial data load via the Youtube API and web scraping. So now we need to enhance this data to be ready for final analysis.

Mapping videos to countries

In the initial load of the videos table, the title for the video was returned by the API. However, in order to do meaningful analysis later we need to extract the country of the video. After a few attempts at working out a dynamic way to do this, such as going of flag emojis. However, due to the wide range of variations of title I eventually settled on just having a list of regex with one value for each country that has competed in Eurovision.

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.

May 4, 2025

How to create field parameters in Direct Lake models

In a recent project I had to add field parameters to a Direct Lake model, as currently field parameters can’t be created in the Power BI Service at the moment you have to either use a tool like tabular editor or a recent preview feature in Power BI desktop. However, I found the documentation for this preview feature very patchy so I hope I can provide a clear step by step guide.

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.