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When: Thursday 30th of October 2025 Time: arrive for 530pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt Location: Robert Walters, Number 1 Spinningfields, Manchester, M3 3EB Session will not be streamed over MS Teams Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts & sponsors Robert Walters

October's PBIMCR will feature ..... Speaker Details -

Talk 1: Johnny Winter - Chief Data Nerd, Greyskull Analytics

Talk Title : Introducing DAX User-Defined Functions (UDFs)

Description :

Every once in a while, a new feature comes to Power BI that feels like a genuine game changer. The announcement of DAX UDFs at Fabcon Vienna in September feels like exactly one of those occasions! But what exactly are UDFs? When do you use them? How do you create them? What are some good use cases for them? This session aims to give a whistle stop tour of the new feature and help you get up to speed with the DAX UDF hype train.

Talk 2: Gus Reyes - Digital Skills Product Manager at NowSkills Ltd Talk Title: Designing Data Products People Can’t Ignore.

Description:

In this talk Gus will explore why some Power BI dashboards become indispensable business tools — while others quietly fade away. Drawing on insights from real-world Power BI success stories, He will introduce a simple but powerful framework for creating “sticky” data products: find the leverage, build the hook, and maintain the momentum. Through examples of curiosity-driven adoption and small-scale experimentation, He will show how teams can turn Power BI from a reporting tool into a catalyst for decision-making, collaboration, and culture change. Attendees will leave with practical ideas to design dashboards that spark curiosity, invite exploration, and truly engage their users.

About Gus Nicaraguan-born Gus Reyes is a digital analytics tutor and product manager at

NowSkills is based in Liverpool, in the North West of England. With a strong background in business and data analytics, data visualisation, and storytelling, he is passionate about coaching, mentoring and leading the next generation of analysts. His professional. His journey began in the telecoms sector, where he developed key skills as a business and data analyst, building a solid foundation in commercial intelligence, finance, and data governance, project management, product development, strategic planning and data-driven decision-making. At NowSkills, Gus combines his expertise in digital analytics with a deep commitment to education, supporting learners as they navigate the evolving digital landscape. He is known for making complex concepts accessible and engaging, fostering a supportive environment that encourages curiosity and growth. Whether in the classroom or the field, Gus continues to inspire others through his dedication, expertise, and passion for both people and data

Calling all Power BI & Data enthusiasts

We've been invited to run a special User Group event at Data Decoded conference at Manchester Central

• Enjoy thought-provoking PBI talks and demos from industry experts and peers.

Date and Location: 📅 Date: 21st October 2025 🕠 Time: 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM 📍 Venue: Manchester Central Convention Complex, Petersfield, M2 3GX We are in the Data Governance, Risk & Compliance Theatre

October's PBIMCR x DataDecoded event will feature 3 lightening talks

Talk 1: Chris & Craig Morrall co-founders from Tugger Tugger is the only end-to-end provider built specifically for Power BI, helping developers and teams streamline the process of turning raw data into meaningful reporting. We specialise in making connections to platforms such as Xero, QuickBooks, and HubSpot simple and reliable, without the need for ongoing custom API development or manual data prep. With Tugger, the heavy lifting around extracting and organising data is handled for you. Our built-in data warehousing ensures that the data is centralised and structured in a way that’s ready to use in Power BI, so you can focus on creating dashboards and delivering insights rather than troubleshooting connections or managing refresh cycles. Security and compliance are at the heart of our approach. Tugger is built with enterprise-level security, so you can be confident that data pipelines are robust, protected, and compliant with industry standards. By combining seamless data integration, built-in warehousing, and enterprise-grade security, Tugger gives Power BI developers a trusted foundation to build powerful, scalable reporting solutions for their organisations.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/tuggerapp/

Talks 2 & 3: Johnny Winter

Dumb ways to Pie!!

Pie charts! The visualisation everybody loves to hate. Why do they have such a bad reputation? Are they really bad practice? Are there any times when you can use a pie chart? Join us as Johnny goes into detail on the things you should think about when creating Pie Charts in Power BI!!

The Importance of Community and Networking Being part of the data community has opened doors, created opportunities, and shaped Johnny’s career in ways he couldn’t have imagined. In this session, Johnny will share how networking and community involvement have helped him grow as a data professional, from building connections and finding mentors, to staying ahead of industry trends and boosting his professional profile.

**To attend, you must sign up for free Data Decoded tickets and register on Meetup to join the community.**

Enjoy food, drinks, and plenty of networking with data community afterwards at The Brotherhood of Pursuits and Pastime bar, 2 Mount Street, Manchester, M2 5WQ (which is a 5 minute walk away)

*In Person Only MeetUp, Free To Attend*

Thank you to Accenture for sponsoring and hosting this event.

Join us for a In-Person User Group Meeting (LDPaC), where you can network, learn, ask a question, and meet other likeminded folks. These events are a really great opportunity to socialise in an informal learning setting.

Remember to tell your friends and the people you work with; make sure you register as soon as you can. We will need to provide a list of names to Accenture before the event, so to ensure there are no issues with access on the day please make sure you have registered.

17.45 - 18:00 Network 🤝

18.00 - 18:30 Drinks & Pizza 🍕

18:30 - 18:40 Intro🎙️

18:40 - 19:30 Shubhangi Goyal - Transforming Language Understanding Using Generative AI

"Transforming Language Understanding Using Generative AI" explores the impact of generative artificial intelligence on language comprehension. This topic delves into how advanced AI models, capable of generating human-like text and understanding nuanced language contexts, are reshaping communication, translation, and interaction across various domains. Discover the transformative potential of generative AI in enhancing natural language processing tasks and paving the way for future innovations in linguistic technologies.

19:30 - 19:40 10-min Break 🥤

19:40 - 20:30 Johnny Winter - Data Modelling for Super Stars! How to collaboratively design your star schema with end users

Despite claims to the contrary, dimensional modelling and star schemas are alive and well the in the modern data world. But whilst developers might have great technical skills and understand how to build a star schema, they may lack the business domain knowledge to ensure that what they deliver is fit for use by analysts and self-service users. On the flip side, these end users often know what they want and need from a data platform, but struggle to explain this in a way that makes it easy for developers to implement.

How can we improve the requirements gathering process to make sure we avoid the tensions that can arise from this?

This session will cover a data modelling requirements approach that looks to bridge the gap between business and IT by using an end-to-end process for working with business users to collaboratively design a dimensional model, making sure you build super star schemas and turn your self into a data modelling superstar.

Come and join the Leeds Data Community and start learning and networking! All are welcome!

🚀 Leeds Power BI, Data & Analytics User Group – March Event! 🚀

After an epic start to the year, our next event is set to be one of the most exciting yet! We’re bringing you an exclusive European guest alongside a powerhouse UK speaker to deliver two game-changing sessions in the world of Power BI and data modelling.

📅 Date: Thursday, 13th March 2025 📍 Location: Accenture, Apsley House, 78 Wellington St, Leeds LS1 2EQ 💻 Hybrid Event: Join us in-person or live on YouTube!

🎤 Speaker 1: Ruth Pozuelo Martinez 🇸🇪 (Live & Remote from Sweden)

📌 Talk: A Guide to Power BI and Fabric: What’s What and How to Use It 🏆 Data Platform MVP \| YouTube Superstar \| MD of Curbal Ruth is a global thought leader in Power BI, running the massively popular Curbal YouTube channel where she educates thousands on data analytics. In this exclusive session, she’ll demystify the tools within Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, giving you a roadmap to mastering these platforms. 🟡 What you'll learn: ✔️ Breakdown of key components in Power BI & Fabric (datasets, reports, Lakehouses & more) ✔️ How to integrate these tools into your data workflow ✔️ Practical insights to elevate your data game This is your chance to learn from one of the best in the industry—live from Sweden!

🎤 Speaker 2: Johnny Winter 🇬🇧 (Live & In-Person!)

📌 Talk: Data Modelling for Superstars: How to Collaboratively Design Your Star Schema with End Users 💡 Self-Defined "Hipster BI Developer" \| Data Modelling Specialist Despite what some say, dimensional modelling and star schemas are very much alive—but getting them right means bridging the gap between technical developers and business end users. 🟡 What you’ll learn: ✔️ The biggest challenges in requirements gathering for data modelling ✔️ A step-by-step process to design star schemas with end users ✔️ How to ensure your models are business-friendly, scalable, and powerful If you’ve ever struggled with getting the right requirements or delivering the perfect data model, this session is a must!

🍕 Networking, Pizza & Refreshments!

As always, expect great food, great conversations, and an amazing community! 💥 This is an unmissable event—whether you join in-person or online! 🔗 RSVP now to secure your spot! 📢 Call for Speakers: Want to present at a future event? Submit your session here: Sessionize Call for Speakers page! 💡 Get involved, learn from the best, and take your Power BI skills to the next level! 🚀🔥

Join us for our March #PBIBRUM meetup with Johnny Winter & Chandeep Chhabra!

Agenda:

17:45 - Doors open

18:15 - Intros

18:20 - Johnny Winter: Gather Requirements for your Star Schema

In any Power BI implementation, getting the data modelling right is key. But whilst PBI developers might have great technical skills and understand how to build a data model, they may lack the business domain knowledge to ensure that what they deliver is fit for use by self-service users. On the flip side, business users often know what they want and need, but struggle to explain this in a way that makes it easy for developers to implement. Taking inspiration from 2 techniques; BEAM and Sun Modelling, this session looks to bridge the gap between business and IT by demonstrating an end-to-end process for working with business users to collaboratively design a star schema.

19:15 - Break - Networking with free pizza and drinks!

20:00 - Finish

📍Location: Eleven Brindley Place, 9th Floor 11, 2 Brunswick Square, Birmingham B1 2LP

When: Thursday 19th December 2024 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt.

Location: BJSS, 90 Victoria St, Redcliffe, BS1 6DP

Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts BJSS

...and as it's Christmas, there will be a special quiz with a prize giveaway!

Social drinks afterwards will be at Ye Shakespeare (50m away) for those interested.

This month's #MSFABRICBRISTOL will feature Johnny Winter and Alex Whittles

Session 1 - Dynamic Measures in Power BI - Johnny Winter What is a Dynamic Measure?

Dynamic Measures in Power BI give you the ability to change the measures being displayed in your Power BI visuals at the click of a button. But why should you implement them in your Power BI reports? And how do you create them? This session aims to answer these questions, including a variety of methods for creating Dynamic Measures together with the pros and cons of each technique.

About Johnny Johnny currently works as a consultant for Advancing Analytics. He’s been working with Business Intelligence software since 2007, specialising in the Microsoft data platform since 2016. He’s a self-confessed Business Intelligence geek and in his spare time runs the website and YouTube channel Greyskull Analytics, where he likes to nerd out about all things Analytics.

Session 2 - Power BI Composite and Advanced Models - Alex Whittles Take Power BI to the next level to support BIG data, as well as layering logic over the top of an existing cube or dataset for unlimited flexibility.

This session will look at composite models as well as Direct Query over Datasets and Fabric's Direct Lake mode, to see how they can enhance our Power BI world.

Use this to combine different datasets into a single report, as well adding your own logic and data on top of someone else's dataset.

About Alex Alex is a Data Platform MVP since 2015, and is the owner and principle consultant at Purple Frog, a Microsoft Data Analytics consultancy in the UK with multinational clients in a variety of sectors. He specialises in all aspects of data warehousing, ETL, Fabric, Machine Learning and Power BI using the Microsoft stack.

Alex is also the creator of Power BI Sentinel, a governance and disaster recovery tool for Power BI and Fabric. Alex has an MSc in Business Intelligence, is a chartered engineer, is on the organising committee for SQLBits, and co-organiser of the Birmingham Data Platform Group. Alex is also a regular speaker at many Data events around the world including SQL Bits, Data Relay, Data Saturdays, Data Grillen, 24 HOP and the PASS Summit.

In his spare time he's also a qualified pilot.

We all look forward to seeing you there!!

Welcome to the first Databricks Scotland Meetup in Glasgow!

We're kicking off the first Databricks Scotland Meetup in Glasgow with a special event the night before DATA:Scotland. We'll have some fantastic speakers from the DATA:Scotland line-up and tons more in the room for Q&A and discussions.

Whether you're a seasoned Databricks user, just dipping your toes, or simply intrigued about what the platform can offer, this meetup promises to deliver insights, best practices, and opportunities for networking with like-minded individuals. We hope to see you there!

Come join us for the Scotland Databricks meetup at BJSS, Sept 12th at 5.30pm for an evening of amazing data talks!

17:00 - 17:30 Welcome & Networking 17:30 - 18:15 Liping Huang - Data Quality Management with Databricks 18:15 - 18:45 Networking, Food and Drinks 18:45 - 19:30 Johnny Winter - Exploring Databricks SQL: Life as an Analyst in a Databricks world 19:30 - 19:45 Networking & Close

Liping Huang - Data Quality Management with Databricks Data quality has been a critical and common practice employed across industries for many years. At the core, data quality encompasses six dimensions, including consistency, accuracy, validity, completeness, timeliness, and uniqueness.

However, a significant challenge remains in streamlining these processes to prevent data management issues and enhance their utility for downstream analytics, data science, and machine learning. The session will delve into the six dimensions of data quality based on the maturity level of data quality management implementation, detailing the specific techniques and features that enhance the Databricks Platform's functionality.

Johnny Winter - Exploring Databricks SQL: Life as an Analyst in a Databricks world

So your Data Engineering team have built a shiny new data platform using Databricks. Now, as an analyst, you want to explore and analyse the data. You need Databricks SQL in your life! Databricks SQL is the collection of services that bring data warehousing capabilities and performance to your existing data lake , and it’s THE best way for you to get started with analysing your data. We’ll dive into explaining what these services are and how they differ from other experiences in Databricks, before getting our hands dirty and jumping on some demonstrations of how you can utilise Databricks SQL to query and visualise data , as well as show casing some practical examples of how using Databricks SQL features can be useful to you.

About Us If you need to contact us for any reason you can email us at: [email protected]

We are sponsored by:

• Databricks
• Advancing Analytics
• BJSS

The final PBIMCR of 2023 is taking place at Bruntwood Sci-Tech office Address: Circle Square. 103, Oxford House, Oxford Rd, Manchester M1 7ED. (next door to Tesco Express and Hatch (food court) Date: Thursday 30th of November 2023 Time: 5:45pm for 6pm start Complimentary Pizza & Drinks provided by our sponsors Robert Walters

The Very Group: External Sharing and Data Labs The Very Group BI Team implemented Power BI as their enterprise reporting tool in 2019 and have steadily grown adoption since then, constantly looking for ways to evolve the operating model to offer a better service to the business. Two recent innovations that show great potential are external sharing (allowing third parties to access Power BI reports in a controlled way) and ‘data labs’ (large, granular data models that can be used to build multiple reports). We’d like to give an overview of these innovations and how we have implemented them from a technical, governance, and people point of view. Dan Burgon Dan Burgon leads the BI Development Team at The Very Group. He has been with The Very Group for five years, and has worked in a variety of roles and industries during his career.

Dan Lloyd Dan Lloyd is a Senior BI Developer at The Very Group. He is approaching the end of his 2nd year at The Very Group and has worked extensively on Trading data across a number of large scale report developments. He has been utilising Power BI for the creation of complex reports and interactive tools for around 4 years, with prior expertise in Process Automation (VBA and Power Automate) as well as Excel based reporting and validation tools across Finance and Procurement functions.

Paul Ewin Paul Ewin is a Senior BI Developer at The Very Group. He has been with the Very Group for over 20 years and has worked across various departments over that time. He has worked on Mathematical models to predict demand, built data models within Teradata as well as report building both in Excel and more recently Power BI.

Johnny Winter with "By the Power of Analytics Engineering!" As chosen by the user group members, in this session we're unravelling the mystery of analytics engineering - the latest hot job in the data universe, and seeing how it buddies up with Synapse Data Warehousing, Power BI, dbt, Tabular Editor and Azure Dev Ops to help you master your Fabric implementation.

We'll kick things off with a casual chat about analytics engineering, breaking down the jargony bits and zooming into what really matters.

Then, we'll zoom in on Fabric. Ever wondered how it can up its game with a sprinkle of analytics engineering magic? Join this session to find out the answers! Real stories of how Fabric can get battle ready with analytics engineering will be on the agenda.

Johnny Winter Johnny currently works as a consultant for Advancing Analytics. He’s been working with Business Intelligence software since 2007, specialising in the Microsoft data platform since 2016. He’s a self-confessed Business Intelligence geek and in his spare time runs the website and YouTube channel Greyskull Analytics, where he likes to nerd out about all things Power BI. He is also a co-organiser at pbiMCR, the Manchester based Power BI user group.