About us
The Power BI & Fabric Manchester User Group is a free to attend event that has been going for almost 10 years and our members to meets every month in Manchester on a Thursday evening.
We host a variety of events including talks from expert speakers and hands-on introduction to Fabric & Power BI. We are a thriving Fabric & Power BI community including end users & industry experts all who use Fabric Power BI – and enjoy using it.
Follow us on Twitter, @PBIMCR.
Follow our Linked-In page and watch past videos here
PBIMCR code of conduct:
The Fabric & Power BI User Manchester Group is committed to fostering a respectful, friendly, and professional environment for all members, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, physical appearance, disability, age, race, or religion.
We have a zero-tolerance policy for any behavior that degrades individuals based on these attributes, as well as any form of harassment or discrimination. It is essential for all members to understand and adhere to these standards, and we encourage everyone to contribute to a safe and welcoming atmosphere.
At our in-person events, we expect attendees to:
- Be friendly and welcoming.
- Listen with purpose and create space for diverse communication preferences.
- To show courtesy and respect to our speakers (i.e. Phones on silent, No getting up mid-talk to get drinks)
- Consider how you can make someone’s experience better.
- Be patient and understanding of varying communication styles.
- Acknowledge that not everyone may be using their native language, which can lead to misinterpretations.
- Communicate thoughtfully, aiming for clarity and productivity.
- Respect differing opinions and seek to understand rather than criticize.
- Make a conscious effort to include those who may differ from you.
- Assume good intent in others' statements and questions.
- Focus on continuous learning by improving your knowledge and engaging with others.
In summary, we ask that all members treat each other with respect, kindness, and empathy. Use inclusive language, communicate thoughtfully, avoid destructive comments, accept constructive criticism gracefully, and create space for others. If you need assistance, please reach out to the organisers.
Upcoming events
2
PBIMCR presents Rebekah Holderness & Shelly Pashley
Canopius Manchester HQ, 100 Barbirolli Square Manchester M2 3AB, Manchester, GBJoin us for May's PBIMCR meet-up
When: Thursday 28th of May 2026
Time: arrive for 530pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt
Location: Canopius, 100 Barbirolli Square, Manchester M2 3AB
Session will not be streamed over MS Teams but uploaded to our YouTube channel in early Feb
Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts Canopius & sponsors Robert WaltersShelly Pashley
Technical Manager at Weeve Data - www.weevedata.co.ukSession Title
Dynamic Data Dissemination in Microsoft Fabric
Session Abstract
Shelly will be speaking about dynamic data dissemination between workspaces and data stores in Microsoft Fabric. She will demonstrate a scalable and flexible solution that drives data to destinations based on a central metadata driven methodology. This approach allows for segregating and governing data across teams and data workload areas within small to enterprise level business architectures..About Shelly:
Shelly is a Senior Technical Consultant and Data Engineer specialising in Microsoft Fabric and modern Azure data platforms. With 18 years Business Intelligence experience covering analytics to data engineering, the last few years she’s had a passion for the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, building robust, metadata-driven, scalable medallion processing frameworks and Kimball aligned data warehouses, helping teams deliver reliable data products end to end.Rebekah Holderness – Portfolio Reporting & Information Specialist at Network Rail
Title: I’ve got the Power! Utilising Power Platform with Power BI to take your reports to the next level.
Often numbers on a page and pretty graphs aren’t enough to answer business questions but how do we address this and retain interest in our reports?
- Power Automated emails to subject matter experts (SME’s) to provide periodic commentary
- Embedded Power App into our Power BI report to capture these commentary insights
- Feeding commentary back into the PBI dashboard to compliment visuals for end users67 attendees
PBIMCR presents 'A Case Study on PBI & Security Analytics in Fabric & PBI'
Slalom, 17 Marble Street, Manchester, GBJoin us for June's PBIMCR meet-up
When: Thursday 25th of June 2026
Time: arrive for 530pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt
Location: Slalom, 17 Marble Steet, M2 3AW
Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts Slalom & sponsors Robert WaltersDuncan Boyne
“Can Someone Turn the Heating On? An Accidental Case Study in Power BI”A manufacturing company had a problem.
Their internal testing failure rate sat comfortably below 1%. Their customers, however, were seeing replacement rates as high as 15%.
The strange part? It wasn’t consistent.
Some customers barely experienced issues at all. Others saw failures come in waves. Summer spikes. Winter spikes. Complaints would rise, disappear, then return again months later.
- The data looked good.
- The engineers were smart.
- The dashboards were working.
- So why was the real-world experience telling a completely different story?
In this interactive session, I’ll walk through the accidental investigation that uncovered the issue, not through advanced AI, complex modelling, or some magical DAX formula, but through curiosity, context, and asking what felt like very dumb questions.
Questions like:
- What’s different between testing and storage?
- What happens after the product leaves the workshop floor?
- Why are certain customers affected more than others?
- And eventually:
- Why is nobody putting the heating on?
This session is part Power BI story, part consultancy lesson, and part reminder that data professionals are not just report builders, we are storytellers. Sometimes the numbers only make sense when you step away from the dashboard and start understanding the humans, processes, and assumptions behind them.
You’ll leave with a practical framework of questions every consultant and analyst should ask, along with a different perspective on how to approach problem solving, stakeholder conversations, and the stories hidden inside your data.
Darlington Chigozie Okeke
'Security Analytics with Microsoft Fabric & Power BI'Machine-learning-based malware detection systems generate large volumes of structured and semi-structured data: behavioural features, anomaly scores, classification outputs, and confidence metrics. While much attention is given to building detection models, far less focus is placed on how these outputs are operationalised, analysed, and communicated at scale. This is where Microsoft Fabric and Power BI become critical.
In this session, I present a deep technical walkthrough of transforming ML-based malware detection outputs into a scalable analytics solution using Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, based on my MSc Cyber Security research into heuristic-based Trojan detection on Windows.
The talk focuses on:
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Designing Fabric Lakehouse schemas for ML-generated security telemetry
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Modelling detection outputs (labels, probabilities, feature scores) as analytical fact tables
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Using Spark SQL and T-SQL for feature aggregation, windowed analysis, and trend extraction
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Building semantic models optimised for high-cardinality, time-series security data
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Writing advanced DAX measures for detection accuracy, false positives, and behavioural drift
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Visualising long-term trends and anomalies using Power BI dashboards
Rather than revisiting ML theory, the emphasis is on data modelling, analytics engineering, and performance optimisation within Fabric and Power BI. While the data originates from a security context, the architectural patterns demonstrated apply equally to observability, fraud detection, and other event-driven analytics workloads.
This session is aimed at Power BI and Fabric practitioners who want to push beyond traditional BI scenarios and work with complex, real-world analytical data.
Topics Covered: Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Analysis Services, Azure AI, OneLake, Real-Time Data
1st time attendees what to expect:
Engaging tech talks/demos/presentations and an opportunity to network in a friendly community environment with complimentary drinks and pizza served.12 attendees
Past events
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