https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/ Writing on Power BI, data modelling, report design, automation and AI, from Duncan Boyne. en-GB Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/why-is-my-power-bi-report-slow/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/why-is-my-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. Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Performance Troubleshooting https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/shift-enter-summit-2026-budapest/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/shift-enter-summit-2026-budapest/ 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. Mon, 07 Sep 2026 17:00:00 GMT Community Speaking AI Power BI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/what-is-a-semantic-model-plain-english/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/what-is-a-semantic-model-plain-english/ 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. Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Plain English Data Modelling https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/how-long-does-a-power-bi-project-take/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Buying Guide Projects https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-for-small-business-uk/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-for-small-business-uk/ 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. Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Small Business Buying Guide https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-dashboard-build-cost-uk/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-dashboard-build-cost-uk/ 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. Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Pricing Buying Guide https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-licensing-costs-uk-2026/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-licensing-costs-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. Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Pricing Licensing https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/how-to-choose-power-bi-consultancy-uk/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/how-to-choose-power-bi-consultancy-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. Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Buying Guide Consultancy https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/whats-in-a-power-bi-health-check/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/whats-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. Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:00:00 GMT Power BI Health Check Buying Guide https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/great-british-business-awards-2026-bronze/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/great-british-business-awards-2026-bronze/ 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. Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:00:00 GMT Community Awards https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-support-retainer-cost-uk/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-support-retainer-cost-uk/ 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. Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:49:17 GMT Power BI Pricing Support Buying Guide Retainers https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/what-power-bi-work-costs-uk/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/what-power-bi-work-costs-uk/ 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. Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:40:00 GMT Power BI Pricing Consulting Buying Guide Day Rates https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/should-you-replace-power-bi-with-an-ai-built-dashboard/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:30:00 GMT Power BI AI Dashboards Buying Guide https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/why-is-your-fabric-capacity-bill-so-high/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:30:00 GMT Microsoft Fabric Capacity Costs Governance https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/when-should-you-move-to-microsoft-fabric/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:30:00 GMT Microsoft Fabric Power BI Migration Buying Guide https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/year-end-reporting-audit-pack/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/year-end-reporting-audit-pack/ 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. Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:15:50 GMT Power BI Year End Reporting Audit ERP Legacy Data https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/the-colour-crash/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:14:36 GMT Power BI Data Visualisation Deneb LEGO Dataviz World Champs Data Storytelling https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/the-report-i-never-submitted/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT Power BI Dataviz Competition https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/switch-off-legacy-erp-keep-the-history/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/switch-off-legacy-erp-keep-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. Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:30:00 GMT Power BI Legacy Systems ERP Audit Data Archive https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-platform-tools-2026/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-platform-tools-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. Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Power Platform Power BI Power Apps Power Automate Copilot Studio AI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/the-architect/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/the-architect/ 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. Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-is-becoming-an-ai-job/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-is-becoming-an-ai-job/ 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. Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Power BI AI Microsoft Fabric Agentic Analytics https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/ai-provider-landscape/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/ai-provider-landscape/ 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. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/deneb-two-measure-heatmap/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/deneb-two-measure-heatmap/ 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. Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Power BI Deneb Vega-Lite Data Visualisation DAX Microsoft Fabric https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/building-power-bi-report-without-opening-desktop/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/building-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. Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Power BI AI Claude Code MCP PBIR https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/linkedin-analytics-dashboard-claude-code/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/linkedin-analytics-dashboard-claude-code/ 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. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT LinkedIn ClaudeCode Analytics Dashboard OpenSource https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/dax-fundamentals-power-bi/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/dax-fundamentals-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. Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT DAX PowerBI DataModeling Learning Power BI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/deneb-vega-lite-cheat-sheet/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/deneb-vega-lite-cheat-sheet/ 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. Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Deneb VegaLite PowerBI DataViz Power BI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/copilot-power-bi-readiness/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/copilot-power-bi-readiness/ 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. Wed, 06 May 2026 08:55:00 GMT Power BI Copilot AI Semantic Model Microsoft Fabric https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/ai-adoption-power-bi/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/ai-adoption-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. Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI PowerBI DataAnalysis Consulting https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/six-reports-six-different-numbers/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/six-reports-six-different-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. Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:05:00 GMT Power BI Data Modelling Semantic Model Data Governance Reporting https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/saas-dead-small-businesses-surging-enterprises/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/saas-dead-small-businesses-surging-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. Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI VibeCoding SaaS SmallBusiness https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/speaker-feedback-d365-ppug-manchester/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/speaker-feedback-d365-ppug-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. Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Speaking Community PowerBI Power BI Talks https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/the-accidental-quest-to-become-a-modern-polymath/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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? Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT SelfImprovement Philosophy Life https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-doesnt-match-business-central/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-doesnt-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. Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:20:00 GMT Power BI Dynamics 365 Business Central Finance Reporting Reconciliation ERP https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/steal-my-website/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Claude https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/i-cried-today/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/i-cried-today/ Being alive is not a small thing. Some days, it's everything. Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT MentalHealth https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/claude-code-has-changed-my-life/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/claude-code-has-changed-my-life/ Claude Code, creativity, speed, and the reality of turning ideas into production in hours, not months. Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:00:00 GMT AI https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/reasons-to-stay/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/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. Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT MentalHealth https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-report-i-want-to-open-part-1/ https://duncanboyne.co.uk/blog/power-bi-report-i-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. Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT Power BI