A hat full of of dataflows knowledge

Life and work have been getting the best of me this month, and I haven’t found the time[1] to keep up on blogging and video now that my series on building a data culture has wrapped up. I’ve been watching the dataflows and Power Query teams releasing all sorts of exciting new capabilities, and realizing that I’m not going to be writing about them in a timely manner.

Thankfully Laura Graham-Brown is picking up the slack – and then some.

Laura is a Microsoft MVP whose “Hat Full of Data” blog has become one of my favorite morning reads, and whose YouTube channel seems to include all of the videos I’ve been thinking about making, but not actually finding the time to make them.

Like this one on the new Power Query Online diagram view that is now available in public preview for dataflows in Power BI:

If you’ve been waiting for new dataflows content, you should definitely head over to Laura’s blog today to check out the awesome work she’s been doing.

I hope to be writing more regularly in December after my work-related “crunch mode” has passed, but if 2020 has taught me anything[2] it’s that I have no idea what’s waiting around the corner. In the meantime, you should follow Laura, because she’s doing awesome work.


[1] Or the spare creative mental energies, which seem to be in sparser supply than spare minutes and hours.

[2] If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that 2020 has taught me nothing.

“Why dataflows?” webcast recording now online

Important: This post was written and published in 2020, and the content below may no longer represent the current capabilities of Power BI. Please consider this post to be more of an historical record and less of a technical resource. All content on this site is the personal output of the author and not an official resource from Microsoft.

A lot of the questions I get about dataflows in Power BI boil down to the simplest[1] question: “Why dataflows?”

On Saturday November 7 I joined MVP Reid Havens for a YouTube live stream where we looked at this question and a bunch of other awesome dataflow questions from the 60+ folks who joined us.

The stream recording is now available for on-demand viewing. You should check it out!


[1] And therefore most difficult to answer concisely. That’s just how it goes.