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

Writeback with Fabric Planning: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get Started (with Gopal)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

April 17th, 2026 (9:30 AM - Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Writeback is one of the most requested capabilities in the Power BI community. It is now native in Microsoft Fabric with the newly announced Fabric Plan Item in Fabric IQ

In this session, Gopal Krishnamurthy and Reid Havens break down exactly how writeback works natively in Fabric Planning, including:

• how business users can create report and enterprise planning apps on top of semantic models

• how other stakeholders can collaborate and enter plan, forecast data

• how those inputs are written back to Fabric SQL

• how organizations can govern the data management process with PowerTable’s Live writeback and

• how you can do variance commentaries and commentary writeback with intelligence sheets

Whether you're an FP&A or Ops team tired of budget spreadsheets or a BI developer who's been asked to build an enterprise planning solution, this session gives you the full picture - live, in Fabric.

GUEST BIO (Gopal Krishnamurthy)👤

Gopal Krishnamurthy is a data and analytics entrepreneur who has been building companies in the space since 2010. He made two career-defining bets: first, pivoting from SAP consulting to cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Power BI) in 2017, which led to his consulting business being acquired by Atos in 2021. Second, betting that future enterprise applications would need to be built natively on top of cloud data platforms, which became the foundation for Lumel.

Today Lumel serves over 3,000 organizations with 400+ employees, is fully bootstrapped from the proceeds of that first exit, and is the #1 Microsoft Power BI AppSource Partner. The company is building a full-stack Enterprise Performance Management suite (planning, BI, and data management) natively on Microsoft Fabric, and was recognized as Best Overall Vendor for EPM by BPM Partners in 2025.

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

Lumel Planning
Fabric IQ + Planning

Power BI to Plotly: Build AI Dashboard Apps - with Adam Schroeder

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

March 6th - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

You’ve already invested in a Power BI semantic model. Cool. Now let’s actually use it outside the walls of a closed BI environment. In this session, Adam Schroeder (Plotly) shows how Plotly Studio can connect directly to your existing Power BI semantic model so you can build polished, production-ready data apps, powered by Python and accelerated with AI, without rebuilding or migrating your data.

You’ll learn how to:

• Build fully customized, production-ready data apps using Python (beyond drag-and-drop limits)

• Distribute apps broadly without getting crushed by per-user viewer licensing costs

• Own your branding, UX, and deployment strategy end-to-end

• Take a practical step toward operationalizing trustworthy AI on top of governed data

If you’re hitting the ceiling on Power BI customization, navigating licensing-based scaling challenges, or looking for more control over how insights (and AI) reach users, this is your playbook.

GUEST BIO 👤

Adam Schroeder is a Senior Developer Advocate at Plotly. He has helped grow the community through 1:1 relationships, contributing to 6 million Dash downloads per month. He’s taught Plotly Dash for over five years on YouTube as @CharmingData (over 60,000 views/month) and co-authored “The Book of Dash.”

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

Plotly Studio

AI-Powered Power BI: Building Custom Themes & Visuals with GitHub Copilot - with Zoe Douglas

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

February 20th, 2026 - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

GitHub Copilot can turn Power BI customization from a tedious, manual grind into a fast, interactive workflow. In this session, you’ll see how to generate polished report themes by extracting color palettes from images, create named style presets that show up directly in Power BI’s formatting pane, and build custom visuals from scratch with Copilot as your pair programmer. From JSON theme schemas to visual implementation details, you’ll leave with practical techniques to speed up development, improve consistency, and ship better-looking reports with less trial-and-error.

GUEST BIO (Zoe Douglas)👤

I'm a product manager for Power BI working on core visuals with focus on the default and theming experience with visuals in reports. I'm also good with a semantic model and worked on features such as DAX query view, Copilot to write DAX queries, Copilot to write measure descriptions, Optimize ribbon, and more! Before coming to Power BI product group I was a Power BI consultant using Power BI everyday to bring insights to action!

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

LinkedIn
Zoe's Blog
Zoe's GitHub