A Reflection of 10 Years with Power BI – Ep. 440

Mike and Tommy celebrate Power BI’s 10th anniversary with a reflection on the journey — from the early days of Power BI Designer to today’s Fabric era. Plus a Tips+ news announcement.

News

• Tips+ announcement — Updates and news from the Tips+ platform.

Main Discussion: 10 Years with Power BI

Power BI turns 10, and Mike and Tommy take the opportunity to reflect on a decade of working with the platform. From the earliest versions of Power BI Designer through the explosion of custom visuals, the introduction of Premium, the rise of dataflows, and now the Fabric era — it’s been a wild ride.

They share personal stories from the trenches: the features that changed everything, the growing pains of the community, the conferences and connections that made it special, and how Power BI evolved from a niche reporting tool into the centerpiece of Microsoft’s data platform strategy.

It’s a celebration episode — looking back at how far we’ve come and looking forward to where the next 10 years will take us.

Episode Transcript

Full verbatim transcript — click any timestamp to jump to that moment:

0:29 Good Morning and welcome back everyone to the Explicit Measures podcast with Tommy and Mike. Good morning everybody. Morning. I I got to clear my throat Mike because apparently we’re getting some feedback that got a little crackly voice which for a lot of people that’s a really famous thing if you have a good little little voice in the morning. So I apologize for those who are having an issue with the groggy voice in the morning. I’m up usually so I’ll try my best. We’ll cough when we need to off offline. though. Exactly. It’s just funny. People like I

1:01 Mean it’s just I think the the general nature of people they they complain about everything like every little thing. Why does it look like this? Why does it sound like that? Well, if you want to get up every morning at 7:30 a.m. for four years, let me know. Then then we’ll talk. Like we’re trying our best. 60 440 episodes at this point. So, hey, at least our best mean at least we don’t know. They’re not complaining about the content. They’re not like you guys don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah. Truth. true statement that that might be somewhat true. so couple let’s talk about our main

1:34 Topic today. Just introduce the main topic. So the main topic for today we’re going to reflect on our last 10 years in working with PowerBI. Maybe some key milestones, some key features that we really felt changed things for us. Maybe even talking a bit about our career. Just open conversation about our reflection of 10 years working with PowerBI. just getting a feel for what we’ve done over these last 10 years and how the program has evolved, how we’ve evolved. I think it’s been a both things have happened. We’ve changed, the program has changed. So, this will be fun, good conversation, lighthearted here.

2:06 And then that’s our main topic. But before we do that, let’s get into some news. I do have some announcements. so, for those of you who follow PowerBI tips and and many of you may know us from the theme generator. So, we have theme.parbi.tips. That’s one of the tools that we produce. Some people don’t know or haven’t seen it yet. If you are a Microsoft fabric user, the PowerBI tips theme generator, which we’re more than just theming at this point, like we do wireframing and we have backgrounds and we have templates and a gallery. , probably the largest collection of free

2:40 Ready to use template and galleries that are in the market this at this point. , so we are now not only just the website themes.parbat PowerBI tips, but we’re also Power Designer. We’ve rebranded a little bit and we have now landed ourself as a new tool inside Microsoft Fabric. So now you can go ahead and use Microsoft fabric. You can open up your theme generation directly inside Microsoft Fabric, build your themes there, and it actually creates an item in the workspace. You actually have a single item in the workspace that is your theme file. Well,

3:12 The announcement is we are now typically you have to if you wanted to pay for a premium license, you had to go buy it through PayPal and it’s a little bit of a complicated works and you had to go to a website, all this stuff. Well, now this this month we have released the ability for you to go buy a tips plus subscription or subscriptions actually multiples if you’d like through your enterprise. So, your enterprise can now go buy a a license or a group of licenses for your organization which is fun. That’s a new thing for us. But if you want to buy 15 seats for

3:44 People, you can go do that all online. You can buy it through Azure Marketplace or source. So depending on where you like to buy things. If you’re an individual, you’re a business that doesn’t control Azure. You don’t have to buy it through Azure. You can go buy it through a through app source. If you want to go buy it through Azure, you can as well. So it’s the same price in both places. There’s no change there. It’s also the same price as if you bought it through us directly through PayPal. So, in all situations here, we’re trying to make it easy for people to get the license. And Tommy, I got to be honest. Every time someone sends I all a lot of times other

4:17 MVPs, people will send me stuff. They’re like, “Look, someone’s building the same tool you’re building.” And then I go, “Oh, interesting.” So, I look at the tools. There’s, , check them out. They’re always really expensive. Like, every time I look at them, they’re like $10 minimum for every single tool. And like, it doesn’t make sense to me. You’re buying PowerBI.com for like $14 a user and then you need to buy another $10 program just to use or make you go a little bit faster in PowerBI. That seems absurd. So, we we come in at a very low price. If you pay at a year at a time,

4:51 We come in at $2 per user per month, which is like nothing. That’s less than a cost cup of coffee. And then we also come in at $3 per user per month if you want to pay monthly. So, , if you’re not really sure, you want to commit to a full year of, , software, you want to try it out for just a month, it’s reasonable and it’s only three bucks. Anyways, just wanted to point that out and highlight we’ve got a new way for you to purchase a Tips Plus subscription and , one last announcement around this one, Tommy, when you’ve made a theme design. I know you’ve used our my theme designer a couple times.

5:22 Quite extensively, actually. Yeah. What’s been the most What would be one and and this this is a this is unplanned so this could go really south really fast tell me what are the one what is the one thing that’s difficult in what’s the most difficult thing in working with theming designing got a list but for me it’s the independent visuals that I’m trying to change and then trying to go back and edit it’s it’s like okay I have this particular property and just going through like, okay, I

5:54 Need to change the color. I need to change the font, but I need to do that for each individual and then finding it because that list is so long. I know there’s search, but sometimes the names don’t align. Yep. Awesome. Okay, so let me not preemptively, but let me not pl this could be interesting. We we are announcing a new feature in the next week or so. We’re trying to get it out the door. So, one thing you can do with Power Designer in Fabric is you can render your PowerBI reports, your existing Power Reports from a different workspace and show them with your theme file on top of them. So, Tommy, one

6:26 Thing you’re asking about, look, I have a pre-built report. I’m uploading a theme file to it continually. I’m not sure if it’s like looking right. It’s not correct. It doesn’t quite look exactly the way I want it to. That’s okay. That’s a problem. In the in the Power Designer application inside Fabric, you can preview any report you want. You can work on the theme file. You can click on preview and then you can just see your effect of your visuals your theming file directly on the report. So one that’s available to you one you have the ability to do that. Is that awesome fabric environment right? Not in the independent

6:57 In the fabric. Yeah in the fabric not the website cuz we don’t the workloads give us a little bit more access to other things that you want to render for the application. So the workload actually does more things. So power designer actually does more stuff. And also Tommy, how nice would it be for you to build your template and with a one button press deploy the template into the service and also bind it automatically to a semantic model that you choose. Are you really doing that finally? Finally,

7:28 It’s one of my we always talk about Microsoft when are you going to do this? It just makes sense. This is my one. Yeah, this is a pretty big one I think. So, we’ve been we’ve been working on the feature. We are in we are actively in development stage right now. We’re testing it out. We’re getting some bugs out of the way. We’re adjusting the UI slightly, but technologically wise. my developer gave me a build this week. I’m doing active testing on it and we will be able to build the entire report project and land the PBIP file directly into the service. And oh by the way, this is the best part. What if I want to

8:00 Download it? What if I need the PBX file from it? No problem. You can actually go open the report and you can just download the pix file directly to your machine and you’re good to go. So you could actually still you can still download the project even though the whole project was made initially by power designer which I think will be a really I’m going to call it’s going to be a very different way to people using their report designing workflow. It’s going to really change how people I think initially think about building their first report or even you have a team of people and you want all

8:32 The people to to go start from a single template, right? , anyways, we’re looking for feedback on this. It’ll be out shortly. I’m hoping to to land this as an announcement here pretty soon. and we’ll we’ll announce and get this out there so that you can immediately build your theme file, build your report pages, and then immediately publish it directly to the service. Well, Mike, , just stamp preview on it. You got a runway of four years minimum, right? So yeah, preview on it. So two questions about this because this is going to be the make or break for me. One, I think you answered one of them

9:05 Which is going to be a big deal. If I use a theme design designer, power designer, and I modify a report in the service, that doesn’t break like if I edit a report in the service, I can’t download the PBX anymore. That’s not the case here. I can still download it. It doesn’t in a sense editing the semantic model. Yeah, correct. All right, that’s the big one. And that’s and that’s what the point of here is like this is we’re using the new PBIP format which again is now does not modify the tabler model. Nope. Does not modify. It’s just it’s just a thin report and we’re just we’re

9:37 Just publishing your thin report out to the service and that means now the designer can build the design and immediately make changes to the file. So, , we’re planning a lot of new features around, , a PBIP format of things and how we’re going to be able to integrate that more deeply. , we’re looking at, again, we’re on the backlog thinking about, , let’s imagine you have an existing report and I want to add a page to it. Well, I want to make I may want to know what was the what was the original theme file that was was made. May want to go back to the original theme file and then add another

10:09 Page or two from there, right? Just add more pages. So, , what’s the hurt? what’s the you take an existing report and add themed things to it, right? Or let’s what if we did a let’s look at your original report and compared your theme file of your report compared to the stylized theme that you have like what’s different what is what is difference between the two files. So there’s now that we have access to the PBIP format and it’s becoming much more common in the powerb.com service we can actually do a lot more with the API calls and actually talking and manipulating reports directly inside our tool. Does it

10:42 Respect individual modifications like a normal theme does? If I were to upload that, so let’s say I had my normal theme, but I I I just change a line chart and I change the color from the default blue to a random red. Does it respect the individual modifications, but it just overwrites everything else? Yeah, it’s a good question. So, when you build the theme files, theme files have a hierarchy of what’s being applied, right? So, it’s like before everything else, the first thing that’s applied is the theme file. Whatever the theming file you do, that’s the first

11:14 Thing that’s applied. And then there’s another layer above that which is like the visual style. So, there’s actually a couple other layers in here as well. So, there’s actually when every time you open up a PBX file or PowerBI file in desktop, there’s actually a base theme file. The base theme is actually the theme that that report comes with. Then on top of it, they add the imported theme. So that the imported theme overrides any of the base theme items. Then the visual overrides any of the base imported theme options. And the visual is basically the final say. So

11:47 This is this is why sometimes people especially they’ll ask me like hey I made my bar chart. It was set to blue because of the theme file. I changed the bars to be gray. now when I update the theme file it doesn’t change. Yes, that is correct because you’ve overridden the theme files because the visual itself has been physically changed and you’re basically overriding all the other properties. So, there’s like a very weird hierarchy of how this all works. , so we’re not impacting any of these stylized visual pieces. One of the things that we’re looking at again would be very helpful here is especially if you’re looking at report,

12:21 What if you wanted just to see like reset everything to default there. There is no button to reset all visuals to default styles. So that’s something that doesn’t exist, but programmatically we can make that happen now with a the power designer type program. So these are things that are on our backlog of like okay we just need to like groom the community and figure out which which feature is most important to the community. We’ll work on those first and go from there. Anyways, just fun announcements around designing and power designing stuff. We’ve been doing a lot of work around appdev for this and hopefully you the community will find a

12:56 Lot of value from this and it will save you a ton of time hopefully. So I know Tommy it’s already saved you a ton of time working with clients and building theme files and and stuff for them. I really do I I really do and again really no pandering here. I’ve tried all the other tools. I am a person who’s going to go through anything that’s going to make my life easier and I will try everything and it’s the it’s been the most seamless for me. I and I really do like the the fabric workload. I know before it was just the PowerBI theme designer workload, but now we’re just calling it Power Designer.

13:27 I guess designer is no longer a word that is the original PowerBI PowerBI designer. So not maybe maybe you’re competing. Maybe it was a maybe it’s a it’s a throwback. So this is actually lean into our to our original. Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a throwback to like the original our designer when it was this one actually makes a little more sense from the name. It’s we design what we do thing. So, exactly right. Awesome. Well, let’s get into our main topic today. Let’s just talk about 10 years of PowerBI. how do we get started, Tommy? Like maybe we

14:00 We go we’ve done this a couple times before, but maybe we just What do you think? What do you want to talk about? What’s what’s up on your mind? Well, I I think this is a great time to talk about this and really dive in more. Again, we’ve mentioned this a lot, but you and I are lucky because we started with PowerBI literally when it came out. for myself, we were looking at business intelligence tools in May of 2015. and your company was actually looking to make a sh a shift. It was trying to change something new. Yeah, we weren’t using we were using a a

14:33 Whole multitude of tool. It wasn’t one universal thing at the organization like hey you like researching things you do this thing and so didn’t really find I I I tried Quilk and Quicksense and all these other ones and nothing that was sticking. June comes around and I I cannot remember where I got the announcement from and to this day I wish I don’t know if I Googled it. I don’t know if it just came up on whatever Microsoft feed but it’s like introducing PowerBI Designer. Okay. So immediately immediately I

15:05 Downloaded it and like I said the the rest is history. We’ll dive into that. But you and I both had that int moment when it started. So we’re again I I call us one of the few one of the lucky ones who’ve been dealing with this tool. And here’s the thing for me this wasn’t my life before this. like I was doing data analytics but PowerBI and when that came out has literally changed my career probably changed where I live right now because of that. So there’s a lot here in terms

15:38 Of from a professional from a personal and I and I think just to what that’s also meant for the greater industry as well. So there’s the individual side of this and then what this has really meant for just working with people and working with data. So let’s kind I think for me let’s start with that first impression on setting the stage for dealing with PowerBI for a whole decade now. Yes. yeah. So let me I’ll give you so to your to your point Tommy you did a little like introduction of like how you got to power designer how you got to

16:09 PowerBI. Eventually it changed it seem it it wasn’t Power Designer for very long. It was only like I think it was like May April May and 2025 or 20 sorry 20 2015. Wait, we got that all wrong. 2015. And then it very quickly changed from Power Designer to PowerBI Desktop. Like I was like initially the the initial change there, which I I really wish it had stayed Power Designer. It would have been a great name. It was PowerBI Designer, I think. I don’t think it was just Power Designer. Oh, that’s just my tool. That’s just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I was about to say I think another stake’s on the table.

16:41 So, yeah. Exactly. Well, , and now it’s more, , Anyways, we’ll get we’ll get beyond that. they name changed it. So I started around I started doing some things in Excel. Actually my my entry with this was Excel and using all the power tools that went through Excel. So was that may have been where you found it too Tommy. Maybe you were in Excel and maybe there was an announcement there around like something inside Excel let hey there’s this new product or tool around but there was Power View, Power Query and Power Maps I believe are the three

17:13 Things. Was it Power Pivot? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Power Pivot. It was Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Maps. Some three of those things. I don’t remember exactly. It’s a little vague. But regardless, I was using those things as add-ins into my Excel documents. So, I was going to Excel, I was making these add-ins, and it was a bit clunky because at the time, the version of Excel we had, anyone I wanted to give these files to, they needed the add-ins for these things to work. So, they just weren’t built into the product. Eventually, they became built in, and it was much easier for everyone to adopt. the analysis services the thing. So anyways,

17:47 I started using power it was SharePoint BI. Do you remember that? Oh yeah, I I listen I remember seeing it. I remember touching it a few times. I remember going not for me. It was a square. It was when SharePoint were all apps and they were all the squares. Yeah, I I know exactly what you’re talking about. Yes. Yes. So that’s that. So that SharePoint BI is where I started. I remember doing some like interact. So I started in Excel. I saw that I could make this page where I

18:20 Clicked on things and everything changed. I thought wow this is this is very different. I’m not used to seeing something like this cuz I was used to building to your point Tommy I was in Excel building charts and tables and things and then I was using slicers to manipulate data inside Excel. That’s basically all I could do in in Excel. But there was no clicking on a bar chart and getting other things on the page to interact. So that was my aha moment like wow this is very different I’ve never seen this before this is like super exciting okay interesting so I then moved into SharePoint BI slightly and very quickly around that time that’s

18:52 When I guess April May power designer came out there’s probably same thing an announcement and then you had the the standalone desktop application so we’re off to the races so that’s how I started as well so very similar story I wasn’t we weren’t doing a tool evaluation We were just in an analytical department looking at things. Yeah. So, and it it’s funny, Mike, because it’s one thing for just a random tool to come out, but I I I want to ask you when did you decide to in a sense put all of your eggs in that basket or or did

19:26 You actually decide to invest all your time there? For me personally, once I started really showing PowerBI and really using it, I made a conscious decision that and a few factors. Well, this is new, so the barrier to entry is probably pretty low. It’s a Microsoft tool, so it can be around everyone because that was the hardest thing too with a lot of other BI tools was the fact, oh, you need a different license and a different login. It’s like, well, this should be seamless. And I and I thought it was one

19:58 Of the coolest things I ever saw. So for me, I made a conscious decision very early that I am going to be the best I can possibly be at this. I’m going to put my eggs in this basket from a time, resource, and skill point of view. And if it didn’t work, fine. But it was a risk I took that worked out. But for you, did you ever have a conscious moment where you were like, I’m gonna go all in on this particular platform? Oh, that’s a really good point, Tommy. ,

20:30 So let me give you a bit of I’m I’m going to mix and match a little bit of this point with the career with my career at the same time. So again, I think this is also an evolution of people in their careers as well. Even now when I talk to people, right? So when we consult with individuals we we try and figure out how to where does this tool fit in our organization people are giving it to me. I’ve actually been working with a number of people for years, multiple years around they are given a task of hey I’m trying to manage PowerBI I need a little help and so I’ll do a little bit of

21:02 Consulting one or two hours a month and we’ll sit down and talk about the strategy how do we do it what do we roll it out to and I’ve seen multiple people working with me where their careers have gone from I’m just the BI guy on some small team to I’m now the owner of PowerBI I’m now managing central BI for our organization I’m now building reports that go across all computer monitors or all operational monitors in our in our business. So like I’ve seen people grow and it’s not just I’m not it’s not me it’s not me growing them. It’s just the idea that they’re

21:33 Passionate about the data. They see this happening and they and they grow into it. So what was your question again? I totally lost the question. I’m just getting excited here. Happen on here. no was did you have a moment Oh my aha moment. Okay. Got it. Where you wanted to put everything in that basket? Yeah. All right. I’m I’m seeing this. So all those point of those stories were there’s a lot of people who have had these moments and I’ve been able to watch and guide them through and this is very common. You’re given part of PowerBI the story you start doing it well. You start making it

22:06 Effective for the organization and then you get more responsibility and then you start teaching it and then you start leading it and then you start giving it out and it spreads across the organization. So for me that moment when I went all in I was currently in the battery division of Johnson Controls. Johnson Controls owned a a portion of the company that was battery and I was in the sales and marketing side of things and I was in the analytical team on the sales and marketing at the time. I was running a call center. So I was the manager of the call center. we had a number of call members that were servicing our customers in a different state, but I was the one like if anything went really bad or really south

22:39 And someone was very angry about a battery, a return or something like that, it would get escalated to me and I would handle handle that escalation. but I also had team members under me that could, , help out customers troubleshoot and all that stuff. So I was dealing with a lot of data, call center data. I was dealing with a lot of analytical data from all of our customers. That’s a monstrosity, too, man. Yeah, it taught me a lot of things. I was, it was a great job. No, you the team was amazing. I had a lot of great people to work with. I learned a lot there. And there was a moment when I was in that department. I thought, “Wow, this data stuff is so cool.” And I don’t think I’d ever been really exposed to

23:12 Like, , point of sale data like, , imagine like a big customer like a Walmart, right? They’ve got a lot of point of sale data, tons of information. The volume of data at that level was just enormous. Now again coming from mechanical engineering I was dealing with like data lots of data but it wasn’t like millions of rows data right it was like thousands of rows data tens of thousands of row because I’m doing testing I’m doing oper like I’m doing a lot of statistics a lot of math so a lot that was like my engineering work but like this was like volumes of data and

23:45 This was really exciting to me I really like this the challenges were big the problems were hard it took a while to really massage and get this data down and we had to do it was just great I really I think I grew a lot of my personality around at time and just loving data. And that’s at the moment when I’m like, okay, I have a very large amount of data. I’m struggling in Excel to get everything done. It just is falling over. And then I started using Power Query. And then I started using PowerBI. And so there was this for me there was this physical moment in time where the technology could not keep up

24:17 With the volumes of data I was working with. And so I got really good at Power Query. and then a lot of the early stages of PowerBI and that’s when I was like this is a game changer like I see I see there’s a technological gap here that this tool solves and I’m learning it and I’m like I’m I’m all in on this and so at that point that’s that’s exactly the moment when I started my blog in I think it was 2016 is when I started my blog. So PowerBI came out in 2015 2016 I’m like I’m going to just do this. I went to the first

24:50 Data insight summit for Microsoft. I was at the very first one. I have the old t-shirt, the blue t-shirt with like a the logo in the middle. That was the very first conference around and it was only Excel and PowerBI. It was just those two pieces of the conference. I thought, “Oh, wow. There’s a very small nit small niche niche of of group members here.” And I I jumped in. That’s when I met Seth. That’s when Seth and I went to the user group for PowerBI. We started that in Milwaukee. Actually, Seth started it and I joined and helped out a lot with that. So that was really the start of everything for me that I at that moment I was like I’m

25:22 Bought into the tool. Now you asked was there like where did you really commit to it? I think I really committed to it when I left the battery division and moved over to a different department in Johnson Controls which was a very IT shop and I I left the position for a it was basically like a data visualization and design role. Now I didn’t actually do any of that cuz they they that was the role they were hiring for. I applied for it because I had the PowerBI experience, but in reality, they just basically stuck me as a program manager in front of a a technology product. But this is it was very formative, but that

25:55 That was a moment where I used this as a technology tool and I’m making a physical decision to apply for jobs specifically in that area that was solely around data visualization. And I was like, okay, I’m going to do this. This is a tool. It’s going to define my career. Let’s go. And then I think there’s maybe one more big moment where I left corporate America and I went to a consulting firm to only work on PowerBI. So at that time it was like I was working on PowerBI but it was like part-time, right? It was like when I had time build a little thing here or there.

26:27 I would show some people this or teach a little bit here and there. I was involved in the community but it wasn’t my full-time job. I wasn’t exclusively thinking building creating only in PowerBI. That didn’t happen until I went off to go do consulting. And that’s when I was like, that’s all I’m going to do. I’m going to take calls. I’m going to sell customers. And you had to be really good at the tool by that point because I had to convince customers that we were the company to work with to go build their PowerBI environment, build their PowerBI reports, build the PowerBI project. That was something we had to go convince customers of to sell it that

26:59 This is the way to go. There there’s two big points here I I think that are worth mentioning that from your story that are really permanent I think for a lot of people even today. one I think the first one is about the career change or the job change for me it was actually my job wasn’t I didn’t move somewhere for PowerBI initially the first two they they morphed they evolved where I came in to do one thing and they found that I was skilled liked loved PowerBI we’re

27:33 Going to use it so what I was initially asked to do was no longer what I was doing because of PowerBI So, and I think for a lot of people your your responsibilities get expanded and I especially when PowerBI first came out and I think what’s going to happen more with Fabric too where you were tasked to do X Y and Z but once you become skilled experienced in these tools because they’re so accessible well you’re going to get asked to do it more. And that was one of the biggest challenges too

28:05 Because I still had my normal responsibilities. But on top of that, I was at the time the only one who knew how to do PowerBI. And I think for a lot of people that’s something to be aware of. And I think like I said, to me, I think this is going to really expedite or really grow with fabric because it’s has six careers in it. It’s not just a single business intelligence thing. It’s data engineering, science. So I think we’re going to keep seeing that. The other thing too is and this is I think one of the biggest hurdles. I think we’re in the same moment right now with

28:37 Fabric where it’s one thing for us as the individual to start getting excelled experience and as good as we can in the individual tool. But it’s a whole other thing too when it’s the organization. Someone has it can’t just be you using it for it to be successful somewhere or for you to get a job somewhere. The the company has to use it. team has to use it. And I to me I think we’re actually at the same point right now where a lot of organizations are deciding do we want to jump all in with fabric or do we stay

29:10 With PowerBI? This was the same thing that happened where there weren’t a lot of jobs. I I remember the first like three years when I was started leading a user group down in Florida. it was my full-time thing. I would get calls and I would talk to recruiters and they’re like, “Well, no one’s saying PowerBI. they still want you to do, , SSRS, but yeah, there’s some PowerBI stuff, too. There weren’t individual things out there because it wasn’t completely widely adopted. And so, I’m going to pause there or take that moment there where from a hurdle

29:42 Point of view, when did you start seeing from a wider side of organizations, especially that you worked in the consulting firm, did you see or feel that initial hesit hesitation from a lot of organizations or the industry as a whole? And when did you start seeing people start going, what, we’re we’re going to invest in this as from a company point of view? Yeah, I think a lot of this stems from this to be very honest. PowerBI is a business. So let’s talk about the different areas of what

30:13 We’re talking about here for PowerBI. PowerBI is a business user tool, right? It fits inside the Excel world of things, right? That’s that’s what you can do with it. It’s a free download and I think one of the brilliant things that made Microsoft really really use this very well was they gave away PowerBI desktop for free right so any business user if I if my organization allowed me to install applications which some do some would allow applications to be installed and particularly from the app source store from Microsoft all a user had to do is I need power desktop and they could download desktop and they

30:46 Could work with millions of rows of data like that there there was a brilliance in them giving that away for free. And I think there also was so Excel, you can’t get it for free. It it’s part of an Office suite package. It’s part of that piece. So it doesn’t just come to you for free. So , it’s almost as if right when Microsoft was doing this whole Microsoft Office package when they’re bundling all the software and having it deployed. It’s almost like they’re also giving you PowerBI as part of that business suite package, right? Does that

31:18 Make sense? Because it’s free. you just download email you as long as you had a Windows computer you didn’t have to be signed into anything and you could start using PowerBI right away correct that that was the genius move here so I think on one hand of this it was this very grassroots like the they were advertising for the product inside Excel you could see things coming around the community was starting to get a little bit more interested about this so I think it was a very grassroots it would land on one person’s desk as and this is the exact same approach that Tableau uses Tableau if you talk to their sales team. It’s a what do they call it? It’s a

31:53 I call it like a weeds approach, right? plant the seed in someone in in their department, their their computer, right? And then from there they use Tableau and then they’re like from there it spreads become the disciples, they become the people. Exactly. Right. They become the sales team for them to then, , we need this because it does XYZ things and look at all these great visuals I can build with it in a short amount of time. like that was that was the the landing of the product and then from there it grew as a weed across the organization and so Microsoft I think did a good job or at least mirroring that cuz Tableau

32:26 Came out like I don’t know five years before PowerBI and so who’s the market leader by a mile a long shot yeah and and in college that’s what I learned right when I was in my masters for data science it wasn’t let’s learn PowerBI it was let’s learn Tableau that was the program we we were choosing to learn now I think more organizations or more schools are trying to teach and educate more on PowerBI. I actually teach a class in PowerBI at the UWM campus or not on campus on online but basically I for WM University Milwaukee Wisconsin and once or

33:00 Twice a year I show up and I teach a full class around PowerBI introduction we do a little bit of Power Query we build some visuals we go through some of the basic features of PowerBI desktop and that’s what we use. So that’s now the organizations, the schools, the education space is starting to get on board with all these technologies and tool pieces. So man, Tommy, I’m I’m losing track. I’m going to have to write down your questions from now on because I keep losing track of your question. But did that answer it or am I still off base? you’re pretty far off actually. But no, I I think like I said

33:33 Framing the question here. Organizations and where they start. You get excited man is one of my favorite things. Sorry, I’m just I get there’s just so many things to talk about. So organizations when they get when they drive adoption, right? So when does that start happen? So this whole land and spread tech technology piece that’s what I see happening. So a lot of organizations weren’t willing to buy PowerBI. It was more of a we are struggling. We were just struggling to get our Excel user base to be more effective, right? And it it came in this route of help us be more effective with our Excel user base which

34:07 Is again pure business and so PowerBI assisted there. So that the most of the conversation was how can we leverage this tool to help our existing Excel user base to do more things with data and then it quickly grew into more of a a governance conversation and like how do we roll it out? What does this look like? Do we really want to use powerb.com? I remember the initial stages of hesitation. I don’t think I don’t hear this anymore, but the initial stages of hesitation was I don’t want it online. I can’t have our data go on. Do you remember that?

34:40 That was very I was constantly combating the, , well, what do you mean you don’t want it online? They’re like, well, we don’t want our data being given to Microsoft and, , they could see it or it’s in the cloud and what if it gets hacked? All these things, right? The cloud. We want the cloud. We don’t want it to be in the cloud. So there was a huge hesitation there and I think a lot of my fear fighting let’s call that fear fighting in the beginning was a lot of for organizations letting them be comfortable with using things in the cloud. Now I think because of fabric because of PowerBI we’ve had a great shift in mentality of businesses. I

35:13 Never at this point never have a conversation about going to the cloud now. That’s not even a concern anymore. Everyone’s comfortable with taking their stuff and putting it in Microsoft’s cloud because they know it’s secure now. At the time when I was having these conversations, it was a lot about SharePoint. So SharePoint was also onrem or in the cloud. Yeah. And a lot of organizations were moving to SharePoint online because it was easier like that that that was a move to go into the cloud. And I was my argument to these companies were you

35:47 Already have SharePoint online which is all your files, all your Excel files, all your PDFs, everything. Like everything you’re doing to share work between Tommy and me and whatever the team members, you’re already online 100%. They’re like, “Yeah, but like no, no, yeah, but we’re 100% in Microsoft’s cloud and you are putting all your files into SharePoint online.” This is no different. this is like SharePoint online for your data and they’re like, “Oh, we’re already Yeah. And so there was like this very large hesitation from

36:20 The IT side of things because they were they didn’t understand what was actually happening here. , , and I think the argu Oh, Andrew, you make a great point. , you trust Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure more than your on-prem infrastructure.” And I would agree with that. every when I walk into organizations that have on-prem infrastructure, some are up to up to speed, most are not. Most are fighting to get money and capital and whatever just to buy the latest version of SQL Server just to keep things updated, just to keep and there’s and there’s a team

36:53 Of people at that organization that are hired to make sure the infrastructure is always current and on and up to par with security standards. You don’t have to do that anymore. That’s all like like Microsoft will own all that for you and you focus on the software that you use and Microsoft patches everything. I don’t need a like this is one of the genius things about SQL Server and Fabric. I’m not updating to the latest version of SQL. It just works and when a new features released I use it easy like I don’t I don’t want to me as a company I don’t want to spend

37:26 Time managing which version of SQL Server I’m on. the infrastructure management has has clearly been moved over to like large organizations and that’s been commoditized and every single cloud provider now offers like infrastructure security patches and management on their own. It’s up to them to manage that and that’s what you want. You want the big company to take that risk of security and management. All you have to do as an employee or company is make sure everyone’s using MFA, make sure everyone’s doing things securely on their machine and getting it back into the cloud. the more you can use a web

37:59 Browser, the more secure it becomes. , at this point too, it is not just with data, but most technology, you really don’t have a choice if you want to just want to stay ahead. , I want to tie a little I want to tie a little of this too with I think where we are in an inflection point with fabric and one of the bigger hurdles that occurred to me and I’m curious if it happened to you, but I think one of the biggest barriers or I think really decision points for me was it was it’s twofold and we’ll start with the micro

38:32 Point of view. It was the lack of identity I I think on like who we were like what did we do and because again there we don’t have set hey you’re a businessist intelligence level two and then you get upgraded to a level three heck for a long time and even today go to LinkedIn jobs go to other places you’re not going to find similar job names or titles for the same roles and I think this has been one of the hardest things for organizations and

39:04 For the individuals. It was hard for me because I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I was applying for or the company and trying to value me as well much less the technology on like well what do you do and what is the value of that compared to a lot of other jobs? Well, if I’m a director of marketing, right? Well, I there’s already an index there. There’s a baseline there on what we know they’re supposed to do and what their their value is built on like what 30 years 40 years of like knowledge and and like

39:38 That’s out there already. Yeah. But for us especially PowerBI because it’s so radically different compared to any other reporting tool because at the time reporting tools were the visual side of things and you and I both know very well our job was a lot more than just designing. We had to do the modeling. all of a sudden we’re taking on this governance side because we got to make sure the data is right coming in. That was all our responsibility compared to DBA and someone going to the table and then we just deal built reports. So let me ask you did you have a moment any

40:10 Frustration or a point of reflection where you’re like I don’t know exactly what we are or has it not been defined yet and to me this was very permanent especially around 1819 2018 2019 I’m going to answer this maybe I’m going to take your question I’m going maybe slightly answer a little bit differently what did I see like a position role change in that time period I think what was building was at at the time there was no demand from the

40:42 Business for a specific PowerBI role right so like I think a lot of these positions were were driven from we’re self-driven right I found the technology I was in the tool I was doing these things I knew that this tool could add value to cut to organizations or teams but the organization or the company wasn’t quite aware of it yet and wasn’t like strategically putting investment behind we need skills that or people that know how to use this tool. So I was I was a bit ahead of the curve in that regard, right? So I think around

41:16 2018 and maybe up to 2020 there’s a lot of time in there organizations were starting to get their legs around oh this is a thing we actually find that PowerBI is making us more effective as an organization we actually need to figure out skills. And so I also want to argue there, , before and there’s there’s people can argue about against this, right? And and you can maybe you take this how you will, right? I’m going to give you my perception of the market at that time. I perceive the market to be you had SQL DBAs or data engineering or data teams,

41:51 Right? Very technical people trained in managing and running SQL databases or data systems, right? Big systems. And then you had an analyst or the business team, whatever you want to call. And the the chasm between those two people were very wide, right? The business team wasn’t modeling data. The business team wasn’t building measures. The business team wasn’t building really weird calculations. What was happening was the analyst was using tools given to you by the the SQL DBA or the DBAs of the data the data world, right? I’m going into

42:24 Business object. And what I was doing as a user at that time was I wasn’t making pretty reports. I wasn’t making interactive reports. I wasn’t making data dashboards at that time. I was going in and going to some large data warehouse system. I was picking the columns I needed. I added the filters that I wanted and I would export the data out. The data would export. I would go to Excel and then I would continue to massage, add data, clean things as I needed to because that’s what I needed to be as the business user like the analyst, right? So I think there was there was a very large gap between it was very distant and in that 2018 to

43:00 2020 range I think with the addition of PowerBI we started bringing more technical skills to the business side right and so now I’m getting tooling from the Microsoft the data is becoming a commodity I’m getting more things coming into that ecosystem that makes it easier for me to work with and shape data so that the again also this around this time I was actually in a companies where the money was not getting funded to it more dollars were getting attributed to the business side of things. So the business that the parts of the company that made money revenue

43:32 Revenue generating systems in the company those parts of the businesses were getting more money and so they were hiring more technical people that could still talk like an analyst but do more of the DBA work. And so how you define these roles now I don’t really know but I feel like there in my mind there is like the data engineer which I would maybe call the SQL DBA or the DBA person. There’s a data engineer and then there’s this middle layer. It’s like someone who can speak to the

44:03 Business but then can also talk very technically. There’s this data modeler the liazison right the data modeler right? And so maybe that is a maybe some of the roles of the data modeler persona come out of data engineering but also some of the roles of that data modeler come out of the analyst. So you could call them an analyst but I think that’s underelling the role of that person right and it’s not quite full analyst but it’s not quite full DBA or DBA as well. It’s a blend a hybrid. So I see PowerBI coming into the mix here and actually really blurring the line between data engineering and analyst.

44:35 And I I use the term data modeler and then we have report builder and then we have report consumer. So there’s a lot to me I think this what this has done is PowerBI has made reporting and report building a commodity anyone can do it. It has brought super technical aspects of the data engineering world closer to the business. So people can now play with these more elaborate things and there’s people in the business who are building incredible data models huge millions of rows hundreds of millions of rows all built in the business side of

45:08 Things and they’re not part of data engineering world’s team they’re not working exclusively in like data bricks and so now I just see this evolution now now we’re moving forward to now in the last two years so two years ago would be 2013 with the announcement of fabric all you’re doing 2023 sorry 2023 I don’t know why I’m saying 2003 2023 3. Let’s get the timeline right. But now with the addition of fabric, you now are even bringing even more of those data engineering type roles into this ecosystem where it’s it’s right next to the person who’s now the data modeler

45:41 Analyst persona. Right? So now now we actually have a single platform that both data engineering teams and business analyst teams can work side by side and collaboratively work together on the same things. And there’s no barrier to entry for any of these business users. They can just spin up a lakehouse. A business user can spin up a SQL server and start building things on top of it for what they need. Like there’s almost no no barrier for those teams members to now manage that now. So that’s that’s what I see. Busting at a curse though to me. So Oh, it totally is.

46:13 And and there’s a few reasons. Again, I I I think personally it’s never been more apparent than now because you are blurring six careers on top of Mike, I changed departments like we are changing like doing laundry. two different organizations like no you’re going to be in SE you’re going to be in marketing. Well, you should probably be sales actually. No, you’re a central BI team. Actually, you’re going to be under finance. most organizations and if I were to ask everyone even listening here what team or what department should BI be under I’m gonna get different answers

46:48 Which is insane to me still because I don’t know any other form or team at an organization that has still has a lack of that clear identity is it under the co if you have one no it should be under it no finance makes the most sense and the thing the thing is And I’m not just trying to say all the negatives here, but I think this is something to be very aware of that our technology is always moving so much faster than the people can adapt to. This is no different 10 years ago to me

47:23 And it’s never been more apparent now. We’re in a great space. And the really cool thing is I don’t care if I’ve been working in the tool for 10 years. Like and I can say that that’s neat. Okay. But if I went on vacation for six months, I’m behind. Like it doesn’t matter. It’s not like I have this knowledge that I can apply from 10 years ago, the technologies changing so rapidly that organizations can’t keep up. A lot of people can’t keep up. Again, go back to my example on try to find a common job title with a common

47:56 Salary that’s valued universally, which you will not find, or find commonality between what department PowerBI should be in, much less fabric. Now, and I think this is a to me a really incredible point of what we do. It’s the thing I also like too in a weird sadistic way. because it it really forces you to change and learn. But man, dude, this is this is such a hard I think difficult thing for us to navigate. At the same time, I I want to pick on your comment there,

48:27 Tommy. I think your your idea around what team should the what should what should this be under? What who’s leading the helm on this one? I I find this very interesting. , I guess my question to you would be or my thought here is where have you seen this be most effective for organizations? What team under under what team does this look like the best? And let me I’ll just give you some of my initial opinion. I don’t I don’t think there’s a single answer to this one. I think this is going to be opinion based

48:58 Thing on what you’ve experienced. I also think this is going to be where you are in a company or what culture your company has will determine whether or not this is effective in different ways. Right? So for example, if your if your organization is really struggling to get financial reporting under place and you’re very driven on sales, finance, marketing of things, hold on, I got to sneeze. Excuse me. I think under finance makes a lot of sense. But then I also argue like well the finance team is usually very connected to what’s

49:31 Happening in the IT world because they’re getting data from IT or using systems from IT that they need help with. So in larger organizations, right? If you put this BI department under only finance, they’re going to need to work with it cuz they need technically access to the data or SQL servers. And it’s not efficient for us to be exporting a bunch of small data pieces out over and over again in files just to have them loaded again into PowerBI. So that doesn’t make sense either. So then you would say, well, maybe we should put it under it. But then if they become under the IT

50:04 Umbrella, , we lose some visibility to what the business is needing and what they’re doing. So you need an analyst in the business. So I think this this data data spans data spans all parts of the company. I’ll just say that there’s there’s never a place in any part of any company where there is no data. I I would agree with that. I think you would agree with that one too, Tommy. Yeah. So as I look at this I go I’m not sure if it really matters where does it make it the sense to be most effective. I do think a federated approach, this is

50:38 What’s in Microsoft’s adoption roadmap really talks about is a federated approach, right? There’s potentially a a co controlled area of this or an IT controlled executive leadership. There’s one or two people that are running the department of BI, but the department of BI is actually distributed across many organizations. there’s key stakeholders from multiple departments that are participating that are asking for things that are helping prioritize what’s next right and so as your organization grows I think Tommy the reason you were shuffled

51:11 Around so much in your company was because there was a lack of commitment at the company level to bring on more Tommies to run many versions of this in other departments and so you were shuffled from the sales team cuz they were having some problems let’s put you over there you can solve some problems there okay to solve some stuff. Okay, well that’s solved. Now let’s shuffle you over to finance. They’re having problems. So you shuffle to finance, right? So instead of actually saying, look, we need multiple roles in multiple different departments to federate more of this information out to broader

51:44 Teams. There should have been a part-time person. The organization wasn’t making the commitment behind it to really bring on the staffing that they needed to fully support PowerBI in all areas of the departments. Does that make sense what I’m saying? Yeah. Yeah. And I’m going to agree and disagree. So I do agree. I think more often than not the best approach is the the federated side. It can be under it. But to me it’s more important. It’s you can be really under any department. But I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned it’s not

52:16 Just the technology and the data. It’s the people and the process and the technology. Because to me I and we had some great we actually this the company that I used to work with there’s a lot of people are still there and they are awesome at PowerBI and what they do and they’re still there and to me I don’t think it was the lack of power like individuals. I think I’ve realized and I think I realized this halfway through the journey and to me something I’m very passionate today is you’re not going to be successful with your data unless you

52:50 Have two key things. is if you have a key data governance program and you have a willingness for a data culture and adoption and what that actually looks like and I think these are so fundamental and for me were critical this if you were to say what’s your growup point not just I’m an analyst or I’m using PowerBI but where I’m at today and where I think I can in so many words hang my hat for the next 30 years God willing is around those two aspects of whatever the tool is going to look like in the future because we saw that the tool is

53:23 Completely different than what it was 10 years ago. It’s not just PowerBI, but really what matters because to your point, it’s never been more commoditized and never been more accessible is wherever you’re going to land and if you’re going to want to be in this space for the long haul. Yeah. You have to understand governance, you have to understand people’s experience with their own data. And I think that works with I’ll agree with you to there’s got to be the investment, but it’s not just in the people doing it. It’s on how are we going to make

53:57 Sure that people trust this? How are we going to make sure people are widely using this and want to explore more? Because Mike, you could have the best PowerBI designers and report builders in the world at your organization, but that doesn’t mean people are going to use it. This goes back to my one of my hottest stakes, I think, is there’s no such thing as a perfect report. That does not exist in the world. No one has ever created a perfect report because it’s in the eye of the beholder. And that goes back to me of this idea of data culture and adoption. And to me, this is where I land today where I’m looking back at 10

54:32 Years and I look back at where are we where we are and where are we going? What is fabric? All the tooling. You could expand on that. But at the end of the day, it’s going to matter about three things. Do you have the right people involved in making decisions? Because that is going to help the wider team trust and adopt. Do you have the right process in place in terms of being able to trust the data because it’s going through so many functions and you could talk about the technology, but the technology changes? And then finally, do you have the right technology and

55:04 Investment in place? And to me, that’s the critical junction here. That’s the breaking off point to me when I when I look at people and when I look at organizations. So I I I know that doesn’t answer the question completely about what department should it be in but when I look at regardless of a lot of organizations I’ve looked at now and I’ve I’ve been lucky enough to be a consultant now for a few years and it’s been awesome to see organizations I’ve been awesome to be an analyst a director of BI and seeing seeing the world so to speak seeing the

55:38 Different and experience those different things it’s not the technology ology. It’s not the bar chart. It’s to me those three critical factors. So, it’s a long- winded way, Mike, and I don’t know how much you’re going to agree with that or not, but for you, where are you at, I guess, now? And what your growup story and you look at ahead from now, what do you see? What are you looking at? Yeah, I think I think you hit the nail. Well, I’m going to go I’m going to respond to your comment, Tommy. I’m going to wrap with some final thoughts here. So, I think you hit the

56:09 Nail on the head, right? , you can only go so far with PowerBI and and building things if you don’t have any governance or expansion of thought into how do we as a company are going to handle data. What is our what is our company culture going to look like? And if you don’t go beyond the fact that I’m just going to use this program and solve my one problem, that’s a very narrow lens as to like what you can accomplish, right? So, I think I think there’s there’s definitely value. So, I I don’t want to discredit that that thinking that my that mode of like I’m just going to get PowerBI. I’m just going to build my report for my team, my small thing, right? that’s still effective. It still

56:42 Saves people time. Right now, I think I’m really big on this kick around automation, everything automated, right? So, , a lot of what I’ve a lot of what I used to do, if I step way back up, like big picture things, right? A lot of what I used to do was move data around Excel and I would move data between here and there and I would do my analysis with a lot of manual steps. I think what’s happened with PowerBI and a lot of these things, we’re now moving to a place where automation is becoming easier and easier. the technical side of how to automate things is not as heavy on pure code. There’s UIs, there’s

57:17 Interfaces, it’s becoming easier. Now, this goes for not just PowerBI but also in fabric. Fabric is becoming I remember in the early days when I was using Spark before it was even in fabric. It was in data bricks at that time and and you actually had to run like Hadoop or you could like install it locally on your machine. I would do that. Like that was very arduous and a lot of technical pieces had to be in place just to get the dumb thing to run. And even then I was like, do I really understand what it’s doing? I do, but I’m not sure if I’m like 100% there. So what’s happened now is a lot of that has become like I don’t worry about the

57:49 Infrastructure anymore. I just turn on a notebook and it just works. So there’s a lot of service-based things. So again, if I look at this the this the trend here, right? Everything is becoming more automated. Everything’s becoming more seamlessly integrated together. data is being able to be generated in real time. We’re able to easily absorb that real time data and put it in places where we can use reporting on top of it. All these really interesting things. So, I think my reaction to your comment there, Tommy, governance is key. You’re going to need to grow up as a as an individual, as an

58:22 Organization to really make the data culture and the governance center, right? Without those two things, you’re going to be limited in scope. you’re not gonna be able to go as large as you want to with PowerBI and find its full effectiveness. And I don’t think that’s just PowerBI. I think that’s any BI or any data tool. It’s it’s across the the board. Any one of them would be better if they if you were able to actually leverage more of that for people. So that’s my thought there. So what what’s next I guess is the the final part of your question. Where do we go from here? , I really think from here we are

58:55 Going to there’s a there’s a an interesting trend. I don’t know how this will land, but I think the the agentic or the AI side of things is going to really impact more. Again, I think the core of what we’re doing is automation. Automation is at the core of what we’re doing. But can we remove some of the I’m clicking buttons in a UI to make a pipeline? And can the MCP or can the AI agent figure out more of what I want to do just by talking to it? Right? Is

59:29 There is there additional context that the agents can now produce that I can then just speak to an agent and it decides like one of the challenges we have right now today Tommy is where do you put the data? What’s the best optimized solution of where does it go? Do you put it in a SQL server because it’s small? Do you put it in a lakehouse? Do you put it in a SQL data warehouse? Do you put it in custoto in KQL? Now we have other things like SQL databases there as well. So like that’s another thing we can pick and there’s just going to be more of them, right? What is the right mix of these things? And maybe what we what we do at some point is or we get to is I just

1:00:03 Communicate to the fabric ecosystem and say I want to do this. Here’s the API call. Here’s the instructions. I want to load this data every day. You figure it out. Like, and then the AI says like it’s got all this information. Okay, I can make this API call. Here’s the data coming back from it. Okay, here’s how I authenticate. I’m going to set that up. Boom, boom, boom. Like, it’s it can just do more of these things for you. And so, it’s going to continually focus on more and more automation, but we’re going to do it in a different way. I don’t think we’re going to spend as much time clicking on buttons and

1:00:35 We’re going to start leveraging more and more of AI and other graphical type things that are going to make it easier for us to communicate and talk to it. So I I think that’s where it’s going. there’s a huge demand from the audience. Every single person I talk to talks about I want to chat with the data like that that I don’t know if that’s the right answer honestly. And I’m not sure if that’s smart enough, intelligent enough to figure out what how to build things that we want, but I do think there are like lightweight remedial tasks that the AI agents can start taking over that we don’t need to do

1:01:07 Anymore. And that’s that’s what I’m excited about. I’m excited about seeing where these agents can start lifting some of the lower-end automation things for us. And then as we get better with it, as over time, if we look back five years from now, it’ll be a totally different story than we’re looking at now. But one thing for certain, it will still be around automated and auto movement of data from where it comes from into final reporting or final interaction. Maybe not maybe not even reporting, right? We’re probably just going to be going in and talking to an AI and it’ll just generate a bunch of stuff for us. So, the AIS are going to make report creation even more of a

1:01:40 Commodity than it is today. All right, I got one last question for you and it’s really quick because I know we’re at time and this is going to be impossible to answer, too. I’m just letting that it’s giving you a warning and I will also do the same. But you got 10 years as well. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t worry. I’m drink I’m drinking the same cup you are. Give me PowerBI in the last 10 years in what it meant to you and and what it meant to organizations in a single word. I have to pick one word. You got to pick one word. Like I said,

1:02:12 I’m drinking the same chalice you are, my friend. Hm. I’m I’m probably going to I’m going to this might not well this the first word that comes to mind is flexible, right? I think I think flexible is the word that I would use to describe PowerBI over the last 10 years. It has changed how I build things. It has changed how I communicate about data. we have more options than now than ever to store, compute, create, do what we want to do. , I think it has made organizations extremely flexible in how

1:02:46 They interact with their data. I think there was less options before. , I think more people have access to using and manipulating the data. So, I think it it makes companies more flexible in that space. That’s what I would maybe my word. All right. Now that I’ve stalled long enough, Tommy, , what’s your word? Mine I should end with something in my , mine is uncovered. And what by that is one of the the coolest moments I ever had with PowerBI when I felt like Tom Hanks in Castaway when he created fire for the

1:03:20 First time when I put all this data together that previously there was impossible to create a relationship before. I remember this one I still remember the same this report and I’m going I I did this this was not possible before to have these things talk to each other and now it’s in a report and you can click on this and do that. I have made fire. basically what it felt like and I think for the individual and for a lot of organizations it really does uncover or really unveil maybe is a better word. It it just unveils so many possibilities to your point with the flexibility but on what I can do as an

1:03:54 Individual like what the skill set allows me to do but also for organizations what it allows them to connect that previously was impossible to do. Love it. I think it’s good. I think it’s Yeah. Some other words from the community here. Donald says power. , , Jack says opportunity. I think that’s a really good opport I think I would I would also agree there’s a lot of opportunity. Like if you want to go down this career, that’s I think that’s also very good. Donald also says easy, right? I I debatable. Some part some parts of it are easy, some parts not.

1:04:29 Okay, maybe. but yes there’s a lot of yeah I think these are great words to describe what our interaction has been over the last 10 years around powerbase. So thank you all for joining us for this conversation. I hope this was a relevant conversation for you. Just a fun light-hearted conversation not so technical in nature this time and I reflecting on our careers how we’ve used PowerBI and how it’s potentially potentially changing what we do on a day-to-day basis. So hope you found this conversation useful and maybe you also have the same sentiment as well. you thought about PowerBI or you’ve

1:05:01 Interacted with it and maybe it’s helped out your career as well. So hopefully it has and hopefully there’s many more years to go with PowerBI and the evolution of data and this data space for that. Just make sure if you like this conversation please share it with somebody else. We’d love to you to hear from you and others that this is a impactful comm community around PowerBI and thinking through that as well. Tommy, where else can you find the podcast? As always, you can find us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe

1:05:32 And leave a rating. It helps us out a ton. And share with a friend since we do this for free. Do you have a question, idea, or topic that you want us to talk about in a future episode? Head over to powerbi.tips/mpodcast. Leave your name and a great question. And finally, join us live every Tuesday and Thursday, 7:30 a.m. Central, and join the conversation on all PowerB Tips social media channels. Awesome. Thank you all so much, and we’ll see you next time. you

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