My Past & Upcoming Speaking Engagements

I noticed I already did quite some presentations this year (15). So I thought this would be a nice time to give a short update on what I did and what presentations are still to come.

Past Talks

• Denmark Power BI User Group (webinar), November 4th
• MVP Lightning Talks (webinar), October 21st
• DataWeekender #TheSQL (webinar), October 17th
• SQL Saturday Denmark (webinar), September 26th
• SQL Saturday Croatia (webinar), September 19th

For a full list of all my presentations have a look at my speaking page.

A while ago I decided to create a github page to host all my slidedecks, so have a look there if you are looking for materials: https://github.com/NickyvVr/talks.

Upcoming Talks

M365 Chicago, November 13th

I know, it's Friday, and it's the 13th: what could go wrong, right? :)
I'm actually delivering 2 presentations here, which you can find below, one at 7PM and one at 10PM (UTC+1).

You can still register for this event here.

Just be aware that this is a US-based event, so it starts at 3:10 PM (CET) with the keynote: Building Community Through Storytelling and ends with an EndNote Panel at midnight my time.

Power Platform French Summit, November 20th

This will actually be a 2-day event:

• Thursday, November 19th with a Business Day
• Friday, November 20th with a Technical Day

Here I'll also be giving my Forms, Flow, Power BI session at Friday afternoon.

Closing

I would also like to mention that the next event (register here) for our Power BI Days Netherlands is scheduled on November 24th with this great line-up:

• Alexander Arvidsson (b | @arcticdba): The Untruthful Art – Five Ways of Misrepresenting Data
• Meagan Longoria (b | @MMarie): What Is Inclusive Report Design and Why Should You Care?

Finally, if you are interested in having me talk for your User Group or conference, have a look at my available sessions and let me know here or on Twitter.

List All Functions in Power Query with #shared

I decided to dedicate this short blog post on how to make better use of Power Query and all the M functions inside. Let's see how we can do that.

Thank you

But before I dive into my blog post, I'd like to thank the #pbifamily for looking out for me!

Thanks for all the help yesterday, wonderful #pbifamily, I 💛 you!

Short update: I started a blog on a #PowerQuery trick, which should be finished later today, yay 😁

If motivation is letting YOU down at the moment, have a read through this thread 👇, and know you're not alone! https://t.co/n3nhNVyD01

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) November 3, 2020

#shared

In addition to what the title suggests, you can not only show all the functions, but all tables, records, (custom) functions and query (results) inside Power Query.

You can start using it by:

• Creating a new blank query and either:
• type in "= #shared" in the formula bar and press Enter, or
• open the Advanced Editor and replace everything with "#shared" and press Done
• Click on Into Table in the top left and you're done!

This will give you a list of functions (and query results, etc.) available in M.

You can search through the list of Names and e.g. see what functions you can use with week:

Opening e.g. Date.IsInNextWeek opens up the details for this function, showing you a description, the parameter used and the returned value.

You can even test it right there.

Watch it in action

If you like a more visual explanation, have a look at a recording of my Query Folding session at the dataMinds User Group earlier this year. The part about #shared starts at 52:40:

During the research googling for this blog post, I also found another thing you can do with #shared:

• The Environment concept in M for Power Query and Power BI Desktop, Part 3 by Lars Schreiber (@SchreiberLars | b) and Imke Feldmann (@TheBIccountant | b)
• Curious on how to start an embedded YouTube video on a specific time? Have a look at this blog post, you'll have to use "?start=" instead of "t=" for a regular URL

#MSIgnite 2020 - Power BI Recap

While there were several issues with the first sessions having no video, there was still a lot of excitement around all the announcements being made at Ignite! And luckily we can re-watch those sessions!

As I watched the sessions I made some notes, I cleaned them up a bit and thought I'd share them for anyone that likes to read up.

It's in no way a full update on Power BI related news, but highlights I found interesting. If you think I missed something that should be here, please let me know.

It's full of links to read more, also sometimes [Sessions] are linked where you can have a look yourself!

Enjoy! :-)

Icon or logo

So, what do you think about the new Logo? Or is it an Icon, or a …? :-)

Power BI Desktop September updates

Smart Narratives (September Desktop release)

Search capability for workspaces when publishing a report from Power BI Desktop

A small step for the Power BI team, a giant leap for the #pbifamily! :-)

Visual data preparation (coming soon) in Power Query: I'm really looking forward to this one!

Sessions

Demo by Kim Manis in [Session]Deliver insights where decisions are made with Power BI

• Power BI Service (with the whole left-side menu) rendered inside Teams
• Create quick reports by copy-pasting data

Power BI Premium Gen2

[Session] Advancing Power BI Premium for the enterprise analytics market and beyond

Wow, am I excited about this one! Of course we use Premium, so that's obvious, but also the announcement of Premium Per User is very exciting!

• Power BI Premium Gen 2
• Faster processing of refreshes
• No concurrency limitation
• No cumulative memory limitation, so each refresh can take up 25GB of RAM (for a P1)!
• Premium Per User, available at no cost during public preview, no price announced yet
• Autoscale (optional feature)
• Add (paid) vCores for at least 24h
• Billed through Azure subscription
• Set limits to control cost
• Cost-management on a workspace level
• Utilization breakdown

Have a look at the Power BI blog where Chris Finlan answers the most common questions around Power BI Premium Per User lincensing!

Deployment pipelines

This feature goes GA: read the GA blog, with an important excerpt:

• Using deployment pipelines, you can make updates to a model with incremental refresh configured, and deploy it to production, while retaining both data and partitions!
  *Only Datasets with the ‘Enhanced metadata format’ switch turned on

So, what else is coming? For example, Paginated reports and Dataflows will be supported with deployment pipelines in a later stadium. 

For all updates, I suggest you check the Power BI roadmap wave 2 release notes!

Free Certification exam

And of course, if you are attending Ignite, and complete at least one collection in the Microsoft Ignite Cloud Skills Challenge, you are eligible for a FREE certification exam! Have a look here for the details: Cloud Skills Challenge

Other interesting sessions still to watch:

And if you want to have a complete overview of what has happened at Ignite, not only Power BI, you should read the Ignite Book of News!