Learning Power BI And Fabric By Attending User Groups And Conferences

One of the most popular questions on the forums I follow is “How can I learn Power BI and Fabric?”. There are a ton of great, free online resources out there – blogs, videos and so on – but the people answering this question often do not mention user groups and conferences. I think that’s a mistake because, at least for me, attending (and indeed speaking at) online and in-person events is one of the most effective ways of learning.

Why is this? It’s not about the content, I think: a lot of what is presented at these meetings is freely available elsewhere already. Indeed, a lot of user groups and conferences record their sessions now and make them available for free online afterwards (eg SQLBits). What’s different is that an event, especially an in-person event, demands your attention more because it takes place at a specific place and time. You can’t pause an event because you’ve been distracted by an important work email or because you’ve seen a cat video that you just have to share, which means you’re more likely to concentrate on it than on a blog post or a video. That’s even more true for an in-person event where, if you’ve made the effort to travel to a venue and you’re sitting in an audience, there’s added social pressure to pay attention to what the speaker is saying. And trust me, I need all the help I can get avoiding distractions these days.

The other benefit of attending an event is the ability to chat with, and ask questions to, the presenter, other attendees and sponsors. Every online event I’ve been to has had a very active chat, and of course with in-person events there’s the ability to queue up and ask the speaker questions or ask for a selfie. I know a lot of people who have found new jobs as a result of attending conferences and user groups. In-person events very often have social activities which make it easy to meet people as well; again, SQLBits is a great example of this with its legendary party and other activities such as runs and the pub quiz.

User groups are almost always free and in many cases there is free pizza too. Most conferences are paid although some have a free day (in the UK SQLBits is free on Saturdays and Data Relay is an annual series of free one-day events). Even when you have to pay I think they represent very good value for money compared to other things you could spend you training budget on.

If I’ve convinced you to attend an event, the next question is: how do I find one near me? Meetup is the best way to find user groups and searching for “Power BI” or “Fabric” and your location there will give you a list of upcoming events you could attend. In the UK there are very active in-person user groups in London, Manchester (I was there last week and they had over 100 attendees), Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle. There are also several UK groups that are wholly or partly online, such as Oxford, Devon & Cornwall and the Fabric UK User Group.

I don’t think there’s a single list of all the Power BI or Fabric conferences anywhere but here are a few coming up soon that I plan to attend or know are good:

• The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas, USA, March 26-28 2024. There will be a lot of Microsoft folks presenting and a lot of big announcements there!
• Fabric February in Oslo, Norway, February 7-9 2024 – although I think it’s just sold out.
• Power BI Cruise from Stockholm to Helsinki, June 3-5 2024. I really need to do this one year.
• Power BI Next Step in Aarhus, Denmark, September 12-13 2024. Those Scandinavians do love the Microsoft data platform.
• The Global Excel Summit in London, UK, February 7-9. Despite the name there’s a lot of Power BI content here too.
• SQLDay in Wroclaw, Poland, 13-15 May 2024.
• DATA:Scotland in Glasgow, UK, 13 September 2024.
• SQLKonferenz in Hanau, Germany, 30 September-2 October.
• SQLBits in Farnborough, UK, 19-23 March 2024. The best Microsoft data-related conference in the world as far as I’m concerned – I never miss it – and by far the largest in Europe too.

Apologies if I’ve missed your favourite event, there are too many out there to list or even remember…

So what are you waiting for? If you’re serious about learning Power BI and Fabric get yourself along to one of these events!