Building to Teach: AI-Assisted Tools for Data Viz Education (w/ Ben Ferry)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

September 4th, 2026 - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

What if you could use your own expertise and AI to build a tool that didn't exist yet? Ben did exactly that.

He built Ferry Tales Studio, a browser-based Vega-Lite chart editor for Power BI and Deneb users, using Claude Code to design, iterate, and ship something genuinely useful. In this live demo, Ben walks through the tool and explains why he built it: to give people a hands-on way to learn data visualisation by doing.

The takeaway: you don't need to be a software engineer to build tools that teach.

GUEST BIO (Ben Ferry) 👤

Ben Ferry is a Senior Analytics Consultant at Solita Germany with a passion for data visualisation and making it more accessible. Through Power BI Ferry Tales, he creates content and tools to help the data community grow. Ferry Tales Studio, built with Claude Code, is his latest example of how practitioners can use AI to ship real, useful products without a traditional engineering background.

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

Power BI Ferry Tales
Ben Ferry LinkedIn
Ben on Bluesky

Simplify Power BI DAX with Visual Calculations

Video by: Reid Havens

If you've ever written a running total in DAX, you know it's more work than it has any right to be. CALCULATE, FILTER, a column reference you have to get exactly right, and a quiet prayer that it behaves at the subtotal level. Visual calculations let you write RUNNINGSUM([Sales]) and get on with your day.

They're a calculation layer that lives inside the visual itself, working on the data that's already been aggregated rather than querying the whole model. That's also why they're often faster, sometimes dramatically so on DirectQuery.

I walk through the core functions (running totals, moving averages, PREVIOUS and NEXT for period comparisons, FIRST, LAST, INDEX, and RANK), then the hierarchy functions like COLLAPSE and EXPAND that make "% of parent" and "% of grand total" almost trivial. We also get into AXIS and RESET, which control the direction a calculation runs and where it restarts, because that's the part that quietly breaks people's running totals across years.

One honest caveat. Yes, they're easier and faster. But because each one only lives in a single visual, they can fragment your business logic across reports if you're not careful, so I cover when a visual calc is the right call and when it really should be a centralized measure.

Next Generation Maps in Power BI with Icon Map (with James Dales)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

May 1st, 2026 - 9:30AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Power BI mapping has… historically been “fine” in the way a rental car with three warning lights is “fine.” In this session, James Dales (Microsoft Data Platform MVP, co-leader of the London Fabric & Power BI User Group, and creator of Icon Map) walks through what’s new in modern mapping for Power BI and why Icon Map has evolved into a premium visual.

We’ll cover:

• Why Icon Map is now paid and what it delivers over legacy Icon Map and Azure Maps

• Icon Map Pro vs Icon Map Slicer: what each one does and when to use them

• The Icon Map Catalog and how it changes map-building workflows in Power BI

• Best practices for building clearer, faster, more interactive geospatial reporting experiences

Whether you’re building operational dashboards, location intelligence reports, or real-time analytics, you’ll leave with practical guidance on how to level up your maps without making your report behave like a slideshow.

GUEST BIO 👤

Having previously led the Power BI and Microsoft Fabric capabilities at both UK and global level for a large multi-national Microsoft consultancy, in 2024 James co-founded an ambitious geospatial data company Tekantis, to focus on geospatial analytics and data products.

James is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and is the co-leader of the London Fabric and Power BI user group. In 2019 he became the first member of the Power BI Contributors Program, working alongside the Microsoft engineering team to build new functionality into the Power BI product codebase. He has a keen interest in geospatial and real-time analytics and is the author of the Icon Map visuals for Power BI.

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

Icon Map Website
Icon Map LinkedIn
Jame's LinkedIn

Power BI Report-Scoped Measures: 6 Patterns for Better Reports

Video by: Reid Havens

Report-scoped measures (aka report-specific measures) are one of the easiest ways to level up a Power BI report without turning your semantic model into a junk drawer.

In this video, I walk through my Visual & Report-Scoped Measures guide and show the art of the possible. No deep DAX theory, no data engineering detours, just practical patterns you can steal immediately.

We’ll cover:

• What “report-scoped” measures are (and when you should use them)

• Six practical patterns for enhancing report UX with measures

• Dynamic titles that respond to context

• Conditional formatting driven by measures (so visuals explain themselves)

• How to keep your model clean while still making reports more interactive and readable

If you build reports for humans (not just for your own amusement), this is a strong set of patterns to have in your toolkit.