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Navigating the journey from Excel to Fabric (and back again!)

For decades, the entire business world has been built on the flexibility and power of spreadsheets. From rocket science to credit derivatives, a mind that could imagine it could implement it with nothing more than Excel formulas and cell references. But over time this has resulted in siloed, manual processes in “Shadow IT” where some of the most valuable data and logic in an organisation is locked away in these files. But it doesn’t need to be like that! The promise of Microsoft Fabric is to bring all your organisational data into a single place, in a single format where it can be extracted, shaped, enriched and secured once for use in any tool. So, from an organizational perspective, there are many benefits of such a unified data platform. However, it’s not obvious how you would take an Excel-based process (or financial model) and bring it into a Power BI and Fabric environment. Perhaps it’s overkill to even consider such a move, and it’s potentially a significant business risk if those analysts used to working in Excel haven’t yet developed the different skillsets required for Fabric. In this session we will take a financial credit risk model in Excel and go through the thought process and workflow for bringing this into Power BI/Fabric including:

• Considering how and why to use Power Query to combine and structure the data inputs into a star schema (which can be done in Excel!)
• Implementing the business logic with DAX, field parameters for increased flexibility and Translytical writeback to model scenarios directly from Power BI.
• Using visuals such as maps and dynamic scatter plots to tell a story with the data
• Breaking down the stages of data transformation/shaping into a medallion lakehouse structure in Fabric , with Row/Column level security at each layer
• Bringing the data at various layers back into Excel with this security model applies
• Querying the data model with Copilot and Data Agents to get AI powered insights

Attendees will come away with a view of how to drive “on the ground” business process transformation using Microsoft Fabric and ideas on how analysts used to Excel can think differently about the structure and re-usability of data, in order to take advantage of an enterprise level BI/Data platform.