Writing
Power BI, data, automation and whatever else is on my mind.
Deep Power BI one week, AI and design the next. Useful beats perfect.
Why Is Your Power BI Report Slow?
Ranked by likelihood: the shape of the data model, pages doing too much, DirectQuery used where it shouldn't be, and only then the DAX. Match your symptom to the likely cause, and what fixing each one honestly takes.
I raced an AI in Budapest, and it fell over on colour
Shift+Enter Summit, 4 September, Budapest. I built a dashboard live in 45 minutes while an AI built one from the same brief on the same clock. It got the numbers right and the reading wrong.
What Is a Semantic Model? A Plain-English Answer
A semantic model is one agreed set of definitions for your business numbers: the data, how it connects, and every calculation defined once. Reports are windows onto it, which is why the model, not the dashboard, is the thing you're actually buying.
How Long Does a Power BI Project Take?
A fix takes hours, a single dashboard takes days, a first reporting system takes about three weeks, and a multi-department build takes months. The build is rarely the slow part: data quality, access and unmade decisions are what stretch a Power BI timeline.
Power BI for Small Businesses: What You Actually Need
Most UK small businesses need four tables, two questions answered properly, and about £11 a month per person in licensing. Almost everything else sold under the heading of business intelligence is for a company several sizes larger than yours.
How Much Does a Power BI Dashboard Cost to Build?
A single well-built report on data that is already clean runs into the low thousands. A reporting system several people depend on is closer to £9,500. The variable that moves the number most is not the dashboard at all, it's the state of the data underneath it.
What Power BI Licensing Actually Costs in the UK (2026)
Power BI Pro is £10.80 per user per month and Premium Per User is £18.50, both paid yearly, on Microsoft's UK price list as of September 2026. The harder question is when you stop paying per person and start paying for capacity, and the answer turns on one number: F64.
How to Choose a Power BI Consultancy in the UK
Choose on five things you can verify: published pricing, who actually does the work, evidence of delivery, size fit, and what you own at the end. Includes the kinds of firm to shortlist when I am not the right answer.
What's Actually in a Power BI Health Check
A proper Power BI health check is a scored review against a written standard: 48 checks across six areas, each returning Healthy, Watch or Critical. Here's exactly what gets checked, how the scoring works, and what the report card looks like.
Five bronze awards, and the one that made me laugh
Five emails turned up eleven minutes apart on a Friday night. Two of the awards are mine, three belong to a team of volunteers, and one of them is very funny if you have ever met me.
Power BI Support: What £250 a Month and £1,750 a Month Actually Buy
Published UK Power BI support retainers run from £250 a month to £8,250. The gap is not thirty three times the work. Here is what each band actually includes, and the two questions that tell you which one you need.
How Much Does a Power BI Consultant Cost in the UK? (2026)
UK Power BI contract day rates run £320 to £656, median £490 (ITJobsWatch, six months to 26 August 2026). But day rate is only one of four ways this work gets priced. Here is what each shape costs, what it does to your risk, and every price I charge.
Should You Replace Power BI with an AI-Built Dashboard?
A CEO sees an AI-built dashboard, calls it stunning, and asks why you still pay for Power BI. It happened on r/PowerBI this week and it is coming to a meeting near you. What the demo is not showing, when a web app genuinely wins, and what to say in that meeting.
Why Is Your Fabric Capacity Bill So High?
Fabric charges for the compute you allocate, not the compute you use. That one fact explains most frightening capacity bills. How the billing works in plain English, the five usual culprits, the three cost features Microsoft shipped in a single week, and the triage to run first.
When Should You Move to Microsoft Fabric?
The most-watched Fabric video this week is 22,000 people asking the same question. The honest answer: move when your Power BI estate starts fighting its own workarounds, stay put while Pro is coping. The signs for each, what changed in August 2026, and the low-risk way in.
Getting Your Year End Reporting Ready Before the Auditors Arrive
Year end reporting is a project in itself: reconciling, chasing invoices, departmental spends, forecasts, budgets. Get your Power BI reports ready before the deadline, or hand the auditors an audit pack and let them check it themselves. Epicor, Infor, D365 and everything in between.
The Colour Crash
LEGO went from ten colours a year to 113, then crashed to 59. The company nearly died in the middle, and nobody wrote that story down. The data recorded it anyway. My Power BI Dataviz World Champs entry, live and clickable, plus everything that broke on the way.
The Report I Never Submitted
I found $2.4M hiding in a gap of less than half a percent, planned five pages around it, then talked myself out of entering. Round 1 of the Power BI Dataviz World Champs, and the report nobody was supposed to see.
Still Paying to Keep a Dead ERP Alive Just for the History?
Licence, support, a server and somebody's Friday afternoon, all to answer a question an auditor asks twice a year. How to archive the history into Power BI, reconcile it to zero, hand over an audit pack, and switch the old system off.
Top Tools for Power Platform Professionals in 2026
A practical 2026 list of Power Platform tools worth knowing across Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Dynamics 365, Copilot Studio, learning resources and AI.
I Asked AI for a Website. It Built a Cathedral.
When Claude Fable dropped, everyone built the same landing page. I asked it for a living cathedral instead — where the floor is data quality, the pillars are revenue, and your decisions crack the foundations while you watch. Here's what it built, what broke, and why the idea still matters more than the tool.
Power BI Is Becoming an AI Job, One Announcement at a Time
Five Power BI and Fabric announcements landed in one week. Taken together, they reveal a job shifting from building reports to directing agents, governing semantic layers, and knowing when the confident answer is wrong.
Three Tools, One Question: Which AI Actually Does Your Job?
The big three AI generalists aren't competing to be best — they've split the map. Claude for careful building, GPT for the broadest toolbox, Gemini for mountains of context. Here's what I actually reach for in mid-2026, where each one falls flat, and the niche players worth knowing. Don't marry a model. Marry the job.
Build a two-measure heatmap in Power BI with Deneb
Power BI has no native heatmap. Here's how to build a better one in Deneb and Vega-Lite, with gross margin as the cell colour and revenue as the label, plus the full copy-paste spec.
Building a Power BI report without opening Desktop
I built a three-page Power BI report through Claude Code, Figma MCP, powerbi-modeling-mcp, and pbi-cli without opening Desktop until validation. This is the honest pipeline and the twelve things that went wrong.
How I Built a LinkedIn Analytics Dashboard with Claude Code (and Open-Sourced It)
LinkedIn gives you 90 days of analytics. I wanted more. So I built a dashboard that combines the official export with an Apify scrape to show content format performance, day-of-week patterns, post quadrants, and full audience demographics — then open-sourced it as a Claude Code skill.
Top 10 DAX Fundamentals for Power BI
DAX is not hard. But it is different. These are the 10 concepts I would teach someone starting from scratch — the things that unlock everything else.
The Deneb / Vega-Lite Cheat Sheet I Kept Wishing Existed
A single reference for the Deneb / Vega-Lite things I reach for most often — the blocks, the syntax, and the gotchas. Built while preparing my PBIBRUM talk.
Is Your Power BI Data Ready for Copilot? Ask It Thirty Questions First
Copilot does not fix a semantic model, it inherits one. Thirty real business questions with verified answers turns AI readiness from an opinion into a pass rate you can watch move, and surfaces the capacity cost before the bill does.
My AI Adoption Was Immediate. Except in Power BI.
I was an early AI adopter everywhere — except in Power BI, my actual job. Here's why AI can read your data, but still can't tell you why the numbers are wrong.
Six Reports, Six Different Revenue Numbers
When every report is technically live and none of them agree, it is rarely a Power BI problem. How to work out which number is right in an afternoon: write the definition down first, then trace each report back to source.
SaaS Is Dead for Small Businesses but Surging for Enterprises
Vibe coding isn't replacing enterprise software — it's filling the gap for small businesses who can't afford £8k ticketing systems. Here's why the distinction matters.
Speaker Feedback – D365 & Power Platform User Group Manchester
I received my first proper anonymous session feedback yesterday. 4.81 out of 5. Here is what people said, what I am taking away from it, and why "Fab" might be my favourite review of all time.
The Accidental Quest to Become a Modern Polymath
I was laid in bed at 2am watching YouTube Shorts when I started thinking about something slightly dangerous. What if I actually tried to become a modern polymath?
Why Your Power BI Report Doesn't Match Business Central
Five reasons a Power BI figure disagrees with Dynamics 365 Business Central, in the order they turn up: document date versus posting date, the sign on income accounts, unposted orders counted as sales, Amount versus Amount (LCY), and scope. Plus the one check that ends the argument permanently.
Steal My Website
Fork it. Clone it. Break it. Make it yours. Here's how I built my site and how you can steal it.
I Cried Today
Being alive is not a small thing. Some days, it's everything.
Claude Code Has Changed My Life
Claude Code, creativity, speed, and the reality of turning ideas into production in hours, not months.
Reasons to Stay
Content warning: suicide and mental health. A letter to a stranger about reasons to stay, reasons to exist, and reasons to endure.
This Is a Power BI Report I Actually Want to Open (Part 1)
Why most personal dashboards don't last, and why motivation matters more than measures ever will. Part 1 of building a Power BI report I actually want to open.