Hat Full of Data - Laura GB's notes on how she made data behave

12th May 2025

First refresh it broke! #LauraBrokeIt

I set up my dataflow and it was working great. Then it broke on the refresh. Here is how I fixed it. Previously In the previous post we ingested a SharePoint folder into a table in a Lakehouse. That is a well known process and nothing new except for one thing. I split the process into two stages, firstly the...

Dataflow/M/Microsoft Fabric Comments: 0

9th May 2025

SharePoint Folder into Microsoft Fabric

SharePoint folder has been a connector into Power Query for Excel, Power BI Desktop and dataflows for quite a while. This post is to cover the basics before I write another post to explain a more complex scenario. This post will use GEN2 Dataflows in Microsoft Fabric. Power Query can take files on a SharePoint site and from a selected...

M/Microsoft Fabric Comments: 0

8th March 2025

VBA – Using Dictionaries to improve searching

In VBA programming, dictionaries are invaluable tools that allow you to store key-value pairs efficiently. Checking a list of values to see if it contains a value is a regular requirement in many projects. The obvious solution in VBA is the values in an array and loop through till you find or don’t find the value. On a recent project,...

VBA Comments: 0

13th January 2025

Power Query – Handling Null Values Properly

This post is about handling null values in Power Query calculations. If you do a calculation in Power Query that involves a null value the answer returned is null.

Power Query

8th January 2025

Power Query – Fixing Missing Columns Dynamically

One of the challenges of making sure your query works in Power Query is data sources that have a changing schema. Some APIs miss out fields if the data is null and sometimes we need one report able to handle data files that are almost the same but not quite. In this post we will look at fixing 2 scenarios, a single missing column and multiple columns missing.

Power Query/M

6th January 2025

Power Query – Creating New Parameters

Good practice is to use parameters for these values so your query is reusable etc. And its always our intention to go and create the new parameter later.

Power Query/Excel/Power BI

6th October 2024

Trigger Microsoft Fabric Data Pipeline using Power Automate

Microsoft Fabric Data Pipelines can be scheduled to happen at regular times. What happens when you want trigger a Microsoft Fabric data pipeline to run as a reaction to an event? For example someone pressing a button in an app. For this we can use Power Automate to start a pipeline using a http request.

Microsoft Fabric/Power Automate

3rd October 2024

Power Automate – Save a File to OneLake Lakehouse

Currently there is no Microsoft Fabric connector in Power Automate. When we want Power Automate to save a file to OneLake Lakehouse, we need to use a workaround. This post walks through the demo I did for the Microsoft Fabric European Conference 2024.

Microsoft Fabric/Power Automate

23rd September 2024

Inherited Value in a Parent Child Pattern

There are times it is useful to calculate an inherited value from parent item to child. The target date of a feature to be passed down to the child user story and then onto the child tasks.

Power BI/DevOps

2nd September 2024

DevOps Parent Child Hierarchy in Power BI

Azure DevOps is built around the pattern than items have child items and so a backlog view will show the items in a hierarchy. When the work items some into Power BI that is not shown. So this gives me the chance to use one of my favourite resources, DAX Patterns and their Parent-Child pattern.

Power BI/DevOps