M365 Twin Cities Fall 2023 Community Days Follow Up

This past Saturday I was able to attend, present, and get connected with the community at the M365 Twin Cities Fall 2023 Community Days event. I haven’t presented at this event since Nov 2011 so it has been a bit and the last time I presented at the event my laptop went into hibernation mode when I was going to do my demo and I couldn’t wake it up, it was an epic fail –> Twin Cities ScarePoint Saturday Follow Up.

This time around I didn’t have any demos, my laptop didn’t go into hibernation mode, and only had a few minor issues with my remote clicker and advancing slides, so I thought it went very well. Now my content wasn’t really any 100 level information for beginners just getting started, but it is stuff that I run into repeatedly with customers, so wanted to share:)

The session was “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 of 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 “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:)

On Friday at the event I went to the speakers dinner and got to meet lots of new people. I know most people in the SQL and BI community, so the M365 group is a little unknown to me. Thanks for all of those that made me feel so welcome and great to meet new people in the community!

In the picture above I am towards the back on the right wearing a blue Microsoft shirt:) I also wore one of my old Microsoft MVP jackets to try and blend in a bit more;)

I got to caught up in the vent and talking with everyone that I forgot to take a selfie picture myself with the attendees of my session. I did get to get included in the speaker photo after the event (I had to stand on my tippy toes in the back row so I could be seen).

Really appreciate the great work the M365 Twin Cities team put into organizing the event and thanks to all of the sponsors, speakers, and volunteers for making this possible. Looking forward to attending and presenting again in the Spring if the team wants me back:)

Here is a link to the pdf version of my slides and I will work on doing a recording of this event to make it available and post a follow up when that is available, that will add more context around the content that I shared – M365TC2023_PowerBIGotchasDanEnglish.

Minnesota SQLSaturday 2023 #1054 Follow Up

This past weekend I had the pleasure to present at Minnesota SQLSaturday 2023 and it finally returned to in-person event after four years! It was really great to be able to return to normal and have an in-person event again versus just virtual. Now I just have to get used to presenting to people face-to-face, that is a bit different than presenting remotely from the comfort of your home and not being able to typically see anyone.

I want to thank everyone that attended my session on “Unraveling the Microsoft Fabric for the Power BI User”. There were over 30 in the tiny room I was in which ended up being standing room only, apologies to those that even had to sit on the floor. Thanks to those that filled out the evaluation forms, that is greatly appreciated and helps for future presentations. The scores I received (on a 5 point scale) where Overall Session 4.2, Speaker Knowledge 4.6, Presentation Skills 4.0, Demos 3.7, and Learn what you expected 4.1.

I want to apologize since this was my first time back presenting in front of the community it was tough not getting wrapped up in some conversations, answering quite a few questions, and going down a few rabbit holes from time-to-time. I really needed 90 minutes for this talk and of course could have gone on even more. I didn’t account for the event slides added to the beginning and I could have definitely cut down on my intro as well as some of the over, I got a bit carried away and perhaps just the excitement of seeing everyone again.

Thanks to Donald Parish for taking this picture of me presenting wearing my Lego Green Adidas (can’t see my Azure Synapse socks) and the awesome Power BI hoodie.

Note: one thing to mention for presenters, don’t get Invisaligns the week you are planning on doing a session at an event. They are painful and take time to adjust to;) I wasn’t supposed to get them until Oct 10 but they arrived early and they put them in on Sep 26 instead:'(

I thought it was great that everyone in the room with the exception of maybe two were not familiar with Power BI (I did a quick Power BI level-set at the beginning, could have probably glossed over that to save time) and maybe a quarter of the people were familiar with Microsoft Fabric. I probably spent too much time on the Fabric overview and only made it through three of the five planned demos.

It is a challenge at these events to find a balance of content for the audience by providing overview 100 level information versus the attendees that are looking for 200 or 300 level, maybe even 400 level content. If more of the room was familiar with Fabric I could have more or less jumped into demos possibly. Seeing things in action versus just having someone talk about them is what I like, but we all learn differently, so have to find that happy medium.

I will look for an opportunity to present this topic again as well as record my demos or maybe even record the presentation from beginning to end and make available soon and I will post an update when available, for now here is the link to the pdf of the slides “MN SQLSaturday 2023 Unraveling the Microsoft Fabric for the Power BI User“.

Thanks to the PASSMN board for organizing the event as well as the sponsors, volunteers, St Paul College, speakers, and attendees! Hopefully next time we don’t overlap with the Twin Cities Marathon weekend which makes it painful with all of the road closures. My next presentation will be at the Twin Cities M365 Community Days event where I will be presenting on “Power BI Gotchas – Dan’s Dirty Dozen”.

Minnesota (MN) SQLSaturday 2023 #1054 – Sep 30

Hello #SQLFamily, we are very excited that this year we will be back in-person for the Minnesota SQLSaturday event that will be held once again at Saint Paul College on September 30th SQL Saturday Minnesota 2023 (#1054).

The schedule for the event has been posted and is available to see here and there are just over 30 sessions and a fantastic line up of speakers coming to present.

I will be presenting on “Unraveling the Microsoft Fabric for the Power BI User” and the description for that session is –

“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 Data Activator and Real-Time Analytics? 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 on the new capabilities available and provide some guidance on how to get started and skilled up on using these new experiences.”

And here is the link to register for the main event on Saturday as well SQL Saturday Minnesota 2023 (#1054) Registration, Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite

We look forward to seeing everyone at the event in-person again!