Portland Fabric User Group Virtual Meetup

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.