Welcome to my Site

March 26, 2016 By Mike Carlo

Welcome to PowerBI.tips, this blog is dedicated to learning and developing visualizations for PowerBI desktop, PowerBI.com and for data modeling in excel.

I’ve been a PowerBI user for almost two years. My background is in mechanical engineering, and I’ve been migrating into a data analytics and data scientist role. As a mechanical engineer part of your job is to develop a test, collect data, and summarize the results. In the collecting data phase engineers can collect gigs of data from sensors. Thus, there is a need to digest that data into what I would call an executive summary. I need to convey what I tested and did my device or product pass the tests.

My Journey to Power BI

In the past I’ve used access to collect data and summarize. Then using connections or data extracts to excel to produce charts or summary visualizations.

All of which brought me to where I am today. I’ve had the technical know how of databases and excel but I lacked the complete tool to build repeatable data to visualization products. This is the perfect fit for PowerBI.

Why This Blog?

This is why I’ve decided to share what I’ve learned about data and data visualization to help you get up to speed with the amazing PowerBI tools.

Hope you enjoy my blog, Mike

Aug 13, 2026

Fabric as a Backend – Ep.554

Mike has been building apps on Fabric as a backend since January, and he's coining it FAB. The case isn't that you already own Fabric — it's that the workspace identity, git integration, and SQL database remove the wiring you'd otherwise do by hand in Azure.

Aug 11, 2026

Crawl, Walk, Run with AI in PBI – Ep.553

Meagan Longoria's five-stage maturity model for agentic Power BI development gives Mike and Tommy a framework to argue with. They mostly agree — except on the crawl stage, where Mike thinks starting with an MCP server beats starting with a chatbot.

Aug 6, 2026

Power BI Desktop Bridge – Ep.552

Desktop Bridge gives agents a local server to drive Power BI Desktop — reload files, check report state, and take screenshots so the agent can verify its own work. Mike and Tommy agree on the prerequisite: don't use it without skills.