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Posted by Sam Lowrie on 29 February 2020
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Power BI Manchester Meetup
On Thursday 30th of January I had the pleasure of attending my first Manchester Power BI meet-up. Going along I wasn't sure what to expect apart from some networking ... but it turned out to be so much more than this!
The venue
The venue was great - a modern workplace with spacious working areas, latest mod-cons and a relaxed attitude (also free drinks, thanks!).
Our hosts of the evening SafetyCulture are creators of iAuditor, an application designed to manage safety data in the workplace.
It easily fitted all 80 attendees, plus everyone who made the event possible.
I did wonder what they use this room for most of the time. Had they moved the desks?
Finding the location was easy, and there was even someone outside to catch any lost looking sheep. Straight in the door, name badge on, drink in hand and straight to chatting to other BI enthusiasts!
The talks
First up was one of our hosts from SafetyCulture - Edd Abrahamson, a self confessed newbie to Power BI.
Despite only having used the product for a few months his reports were excellent, which reflects how quickly a user can become familiar with Power BI.
Edd's case study was on the use of Power Automate in conjunction with Webhooks to write back data and refresh in real time.
Power Automate is part of the Power platform (which also includes Power Apps and Power BI). Looking forward to trying it out!
Next up was Lex Smeets, Business Intelligence Architect at Sogeti Nederland B. V. (who had come over from the Netherlands for the Meetup).
Lex did a presentation on implementing row-level security, both using static and dynamic user groups.
This was an excellent lecture, teaching not only the procedure of setting both up but also the do's and don'ts of row level security.
You can find a written version of the lecture here, handily converted from Dutch into English (thanks Google).
The last speaker is actually a BI hero of my own, Ryan Bentham - BI developer and consultant.
Ryan has done some amazing work which you may have previously seen in the BI galleries. Check out his work here.
The final lecture was a massive flex for what Power BI can do and it blew me away. All the reports presented were so fluid, they barely appeared to be BI reports.
The reports included using R, Python, D3.JS, Synoptic panels, bookmarks, Chiclet slicers and many more.
A massive thank you to Alex Taylor, SafetyCulture and all the other hosts for such an enjoyable evening of networking, learning and free pizza!