top of page



What Is Microsoft Fabric? A Plain-English Guide for Leaders
Microsoft Fabric keeps showing up everywhere. In licensing emails, in vendor pitches, in that awkward moment when someone senior asks "should we be using Fabric?" and nobody in the room can give a straight answer. That's a problem. Not because Fabric is urgent for everyone, but because it's now central to Microsoft's data strategy going forward. Whether you adopt it or not, you need to understand what it actually is so you can make that call properly. Most explanations jump s
anne3082
Jun 293 min read


Connect Excel to Power BI So It Updates Itself
Learn how a Power BI to Excel refresh with a live connection keeps board packs and weekly updates from running on stale, copy-pasted data.
Anne Adair-Major
Jun 235 min read


Power BI Personal Bookmarks Every Report User Should Know
Power BI personal bookmarks let end users save customized views of any report, including filters, slicers, sort orders, and cross-highlights, without changing the report for anyone else. This is an incredibly useful feature even at its most basic level, and yet most people never use them, which means they are missing an opportunity to go from passively reading to saving themselves time, or even actively adding value through it. I've been working with Power BI across enterpris

Anne Adair-Major
Mar 283 min read


Power BI as a Platform: More Airbnb Than Plumbing?
I like to think about good Power BI adoption more like Airbnb than plumbing. A logical comparison, I think you'll agree? But go with me on this, because there's a genuinely undervalued concept hiding inside most organisations' reporting environments, and it's unlocked with a change in mindset rather than more Power BI as a Platform: More Airbnb Than PlumbingCapEx funding. A lot of businesses treat their analytics like a utility. Data flows in one direction: a dedicated team b

Anne Adair-Major
Mar 234 min read


6 Self-Service Data Lessons from Everyday Platforms
If you'll get into a stranger's car, then why won't you trust your colleague's sales report? It's a fair question, and it gets at something I think about a lot when helping organisations with their self-service data strategy. We trust platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Tinder with some pretty significant decisions, often involving strangers, money, or both. But inside our own organisations, people won't touch a dataset they didn't build themselves. Self-service data strategy su

Anne Adair-Major
Mar 234 min read


Pragmatic Power BI Report Design That Actually Gets Used
My Nana always said "good things come in small packages." I don't think she meant Power BI reports, but here we are, because sometimes my best ideas are the small ones. I was working with a client on a larger Power BI engagement, and they asked would I also add some refresh to existing reports into the scope. When I work with clients on their Power BI service, one of the first things I do is create a standard JSON theme and design approach so that reports look like they belon
anne3082
Feb 274 min read
bottom of page