Accessibility in Power BI is often treated as a final checkbox, something to review just before publishing. But as AI accelerates how reports are built, the real risk is that insight becomes faster to generate yet harder for people to actually use. This article reframes accessibility not as compliance, but as a design framework that shapes how users perceive, navigate, and understand information. If Power BI is becoming more intelligent, our reports need to become more inclusive.

A moment with a colour‑blind stakeholder changed the way I think about dashboards forever, and it eventually led me to build PBIX A11y, a free browser‑based accessibility checker for Power BI. What started as a painful realisation about how easily we can exclude people without knowing has grown into a practical tool powered by WCAG principles and Lovable, designed to help us catch accessibility issues earlier and build more inclusive reports. In this post, I share the story behind it, what the tool checks, and how the new Colour Blindness Simulator and Alt Text Generator fit into the journey.

We are going to design a Power BI semantic model that serves multiple reports built on top of a Snowflake / SQL warehouse using a typical Gold layer (fact and dimension tables) for a hybrid DeFi & TradFi analytics platform. The original question came from a real analytical query that joins two fact tables (FACT_TRADE_EXECUTION and FACT_WALLET_ACCOUNT) with several conformed dimensions (DIM_PROTOCOL, DIM_INVESTOR_TIER, DIM_ASSET_CLASS, DIM_INSTRUMENT_TYPE) and later mixes ledger-statement logic with window functions (ROW_NUMBER, SUM() OVER (...)).

The design decision was: one semantic model per fact table, one model per business subject area, or a single wide custom query that pre-computes everything?

This article summarizes the conclusions and aligns them with current Microsoft and community guidance.

Every click hides eight steps most users never learn. And that ignorance is quietly breaking dashboards across the globe. 

Accidentally deleted a report in Microsoft Fabric? The new soft delete and recovery feature can help you restore it in seconds. Here’s how it works.

pbi-cli is an open-source Python CLI that gives Claude Code 12 domain-specific Power BI skills  enabling natural language authoring of semantic models via .NET TOM and PBIR report files. No MCP server, no sidecar process, sub-second execution. Install once, then just ask Claude.

When I first opened Power BI Desktop, I thought I was looking at a smarter, shinier version of Excel charts.

I was wrong. Not a little wrong. Completely wrong.

After years of using Power BI across corporate trainings, community sessions, and real-world projects — here are the 5 things I wish someone had told me on Day 1.

Hardcoding format strings across every DAX measure is a pain. In my latest blog, I show how one DAX UDF handles all your numeric formatting needs, currency symbols, K/M/B/T scaling, bracket negatives, delta icons and more, all with just one DAX User Defined Function. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Do you have an idea for how Semantic Link could simplify, harden, or streamline how developers build and maintain semantic models?

We’re launching the Fabric Semantic Link Developer Experience Challenge, a community contest focused on improving how teams develop, test, document, and maintain semantic models in Microsoft Fabric.

Sometimes you need a report to refresh not on a fixed schedule, but when a specific event occurs.

A common example is when the table behind your semantic model is updated by a trigger or an ETL process that finishes at unpredictable times. In that case, a standard scheduled refresh is not enough.

I ran into exactly this scenario in one of my projects. A monitoring system was collecting CPU load metrics and writing rows into a database table only when CPU usage exceeded a threshold. As soon as those rows appeared, the report needed to be refreshed immediately.

With this kind of logic, you cannot reliably predict the refresh time in advance. CPU load may stay normal for several days, or it may cross the threshold multiple times in one day. For scenarios like this, triggering a refresh through the API is a much better fit.

In this article, I will show a simple and reliable method:

1. Create a Cache Refresh Plan for the report
2. Get the refresh plan ID
3. Trigger it with a single PowerShell command

Power BI Report Server exposes REST API operations for Cache Refresh Plans, including getting plans, executing a plan immediately, and retrieving execution history.

🚀 The Future of BI: AI & Copilot in Power BI

Power BI is evolving from dashboards to intelligent analytics. With AI and Copilot, users can uncover patterns, predict trends, and ask questions in natural language—getting instant insights, visuals, and explanations.

Powered by Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, Power BI makes advanced analytics accessible to everyone—no data science required.

💡 It’s not just reporting anymore—it’s AI-driven decision-making.

CONCATENATEX is far more than a string aggregation function. It serves as a bridge between normalized LMS data structures and business-ready analytics. In the context of Moodle and Power BI, it enables the creation of compact, narrative-driven outputs that enhance clarity, reduce visual clutter, and improve decision-making.

We have a new contest, officially launching Monday, March 16th. 

Build a clear, end-to-end Fabric solution that uses a Medallion architecture: ingest raw data with pipelines, manage both data and metadata, transform it into Silver and Gold layers in a Fabric Data Warehouse (using a dbt job), and finish with an AI-ready Power BI semantic model. The goal is to show a repeatable pattern where well-designed pipelines and warehouse models lead to trustworthy Copilot answers in Power BI.