Hat Full of Data - Page 2 of 14 - Laura GB's notes on how she made data behave

26th August 2025

Lewis and Laura vs. Notebook and Microsoft Graph: Part 2

A recent project made me reach out to Lewis Baybutt to scream “Help!, I need help getting with authentication for an Excel file in SharePoint in a Microsoft Fabric Notebook”. Yes all the delights of Excel and SharePoint in one project. So started the battle with understanding authentication, permissions and apparently a Notebook and Microsoft Graph is the way. The...

Microsoft Fabric/Microsoft Graph

21st August 2025

Get Secret from Azure Key Vault in a Microsoft Fabric Notebook

I’ve recently been working with Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric and have needed to get a credentials information that should be kept secure. The obvious place to store such credentials is Azure Key Vault so now we need to get our secret from there. This is a really short post to help me out when I need a fast explanation on...

Azure/Microsoft Fabric

29th July 2025

Power BI – Improve a card with SVG

The not so new card in Power BI, introduced in 2023, includes some lovely features. The first is the simplest of adding multiple values and having cards laid out evenly in a row in a single visual. The second awesome feature adding an image to a card with SVG. Starting Point This report is visualising web site views per year....

Power BI/SVG

15th July 2025

Power BI – Calculation Groups aren’t scary

Let’s start by being honest, calculation groups scared me. I had read the brilliant articles, seen the demos and walked away going “hell no!”. Then in a training session a client asks for a visual that really really should be done with a calculation group, so I had to sit down and get my head around them. This post is...

Power BI

8th July 2025

Paginated Reports – Power Query as a Source

In March 2024 Microsoft added Power Query as a source for Paginated Reports. This means a paginated report can connect to any data source that Power Query can connect to. This post walks through the process with a few gotchas to be aware of. Get Data As with most reporting the first task is connect to the data using Power...

Paginated Reports/Power Query

11th June 2025

Power BI – Create a calendar using TMDL

TMDL is short for Tabular Model Definition Language in Power BI desktop. It allows us to script definitions and changes to a Power BI model. In this post I use TMDL to quickly create a calendar for a report that includes column options such as sort by, formatting and hidden columns. Calendar Table Nearly every report I create includes a...

Power BI

5th June 2025

Microsoft Fabric – Create a Data Pipeline with Parameters

One of the skills of creating good solutions on any platform is building reusable modules. For a part to be reusable we reduce the hard coding and pass in parameters. This is true for data pipelines. So this post post covers creating a data pipeline with parameters. Initial Scenario In order to demonstrate how to create a data pipeline with...

Microsoft Fabric

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

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

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