Portland Fabric User Group

From Idea to External Tool: Building the AE Power BI Multi-Tool Suite

This is the story of how a set of recurring Power BI frustrations grew into a fully-fledged external tool. It started with a list of time-consuming tasks—merging reports, cleaning unused visuals, organizing model diagrams—that begged for automation. The initial challenge wasn’t the code, but shaping the logic: what should be automated, in what order, and with what safeguards?

From there, the build process became an experiment in modern development approaches: using Claude to accelerate prototyping, exploring Model Context Protocols (MCPs) for structured tooling, and settling on a plugin-based architecture for flexibility. Each step was driven by practical needs rather than feature checklists, with the tool evolving alongside the workflow problems it solved.

The result is the AE Power BI Multi-Tool Suite—a modular set of utilities for report merging, model layout optimization, and cleanup. By the time of this session, it will also include new capabilities like custom visual cleanup, bulk visual-level filter hiding, and automatic table column width adjustments.

We’ll walk through the journey—decisions, missteps, and technical breakthroughs—while showing working examples. You’ll leave with both inspiration for building your own tools and a practical understanding of how this one came together.

Collect, Combine, and Transform Data using Power Query in Power BI and Excel

Join Gil Raviv, co-author of the 2nd edition of Collect, Combine, and Transform Data using Power Query in Power BI and Excel, for a hands-on and forward-looking session.

We will focus on three key areas:

1. What the book has to offer – Get an overview of the chapters, with practical takeaways you can apply immediately. You’ll see how each part of the book can help you prepare, combine, and transform data more effectively and boost your career.
2. Hands-on learning – Walk through three carefully selected exercises from the book, designed to sharpen your skills in solving real-world data preparation challenges.
3. Why this knowledge matters now – Understand why mastering Power Query is more important than ever in the era of Microsoft Fabric and AI. We’ll explore the opportunities this skillset opens up for organizations looking to streamline analytics, improve governance, and unlock more value from their data.

Whether you’re just getting started or already experienced with Power BI, you’ll leave this session with practical techniques and a clear vision of how Power Query skills can set you apart in today’s data landscape.

Building Dashboards Executives Love with Power BI

A dashboard with multiple pages of metrics will get you some post-demo wow's, but in order to build a dashboard that gets used by executives, they need the ability to track the business impact. In this session, we will discuss & share the full lifecycle of building executive-ready dashboards in Power BI, starting with the data connection and pipeline strategies to structuring measurements and KPIs so they align with real business outcomes. Finally, we’ll discuss enabling drill-downs for self-service analytics, so executives can go beyond the surface when they want answers on the spot, freeing up your time to work on more impactful & interesting analysis.