Investigations & Case Studies

Spikes, proposals and architectural artefacts from real projects. Anonymised and preserved.

All Investigations

28 May 2026: Persisting Context Across Power BI Drillthrough

Different employees had targets set for different frequencies (weekly or monthly). Is there anything we could do to persist this frequency selection on drillthrough?

21 May 2026: When Deletion And Archiving Look The Same

Deleted or archived? Our Analytics logic couldn't tell the difference. These are the questions we had to ask.

14 May 2026: Designing Around Row-Level Security (RLS) Limitations in Power BI

A dual-role user needs two different views of the data. A write up on what you can do and what you can't.

7 May 2026: Closing the Gaps and Forcing Zeroes on a Power BI Line Chart

How to display a continuous time series line chart without breaking date filter behaviour (including zero values for missing data).

30 Apr 2026: User-Controlled Weightings and Nested Drillthrough in Power BI

Adding user-controlled weightings and nested drillthrough to a forecast report with trade-offs and implementation notes.

23 Apr 2026: Why Drillthrough Beats Buttons For Context-Sensitive Analysis

A case study exploring how to add functionality for viewing historic performance

16 Apr 2026: Pinning Power BI Reports To Dynamics

Is it possible to pin Power BI dashboards to Dynamics?

9 Apr 2026: Optimisation of Power BI Reports

A walkthrough on identifying and fixing slow Power BI reports.

2 Apr 2026: Allowing Dynamic KPI Selection

A practical walkthrough of implementing dynamic KPI selection in Power BI.

26 Mar 2026: Advanced Filtering

How to handle Customers having different filtering requirements

19 Mar 2026: Actuals vs Targets Without a Warehouse

Investigation into whether it was possible to build an actuals vs target report using Power Query

12 Mar 2026: Multiple Workspaces in the Same Tenant

A clear five-step workflow that deals with the situation when a customer has multiple production workspaces.

5 Mar 2026: A Slicer For Overlapping Categories

Creating a slicer when the underlying categories are not mutually exclusive and instead overlap is a modelling layer solution not a slicer setting.

26 Feb 2026: Approach To Switching Fee Models

Three migration strategies for a core data model change and the new reporting opportunities that are unlocked.

19 Feb 2026: Star Schema Proposal

My unsolicited view of the existing data architecture.