About Us

My name is Paul MacLennan. I’m a British man living in Estonia with a family of 3 children.

Helping people and figuring out solutions is my lifeblood.  Achieving those solutions and going the extra mile is the work-energy that keeps me going up against the most difficult challenges that quite often takes me out of my comfort zone.  Power BI lets me do all of these things.  In the age of data, almost everything is now connected or can be easily related to. 

Areas of life and work can now be connected, and this allows me to indulge in my geeky passion.

 Being in a call center environment for ten years, I’ve seen how policies and processes can frustrate people.  This applied to customers and colleagues alike. 

I took these blockers as personal challenges to bring happiness or just relief to those I interacted with daily. As I rose through the ranks, I saw a bigger picture painted with numbers, coupled with a well-placed question, brought a solution that touched millions and continues to do so to this day.

With my eyes opened to the world of data, frustration turned to me this time as I tried to pursue more data to help others.  I learned quickly that data was not readily available and was not easily consumable.  Reports usually consisted of copying and pasting between excel files. 

Furthermore, the person responsible for maintaining the house of cards full of data was always struggling to keep up with mistakes and changes to the data.  Additional information requested was provided later with intricate cell formulas that were off-putting to decipher, and I found myself always needing to go back to redefine the required request.

To keep making an impact, I was getting frustrated with asking for data, and I didn’t like feeling embarrassed when having to immediately follow-up.  I soon took matters into my hand via google.

Learning Power BI was entirely by accident.  I kept searching for excel terms and solutions.  Whilst searching for the multitude of solutions for excel, I found there were multiple flavors of excel that had their limitation.  Things such as PowerPivot and Power Query got even more complicated with them being an add-on at some point and that solutions I began to create, didn’t work with older versions of Excel or even other versions of Power Query.  The transformation of data was the biggest revolutionary item that got me hooked.  I no longer had to rely on crazy cell formulas that would look like a foreign language and would immediately begin to shut me down, although I wanted that output so badly.  It was at this point, mentions of Power BI started to become more frequent, and I learnt this was the perfect platform for me to continue to invest myself in.

Power BI has a client tool that receives monthly updates, which forces everyone to be aligned.  It has a web-based output via the cloud or On-Premise solution that kills the need for any special tools, hardware, or circumstances.  You only need a web browser.

It was there the spark began.  I used trial and error, along with some basic tutorials found on YouTube.  I built a library of data Yoda’s (via subscription and bookmarks) who I follow to this day. Occasionally I would hit google to refine my learning and search a multitude of forum posts and blog articles.

Every time I found a new technique, I would implement it immediately, and I always added a tweak or two to show off to those around me.

I found that with this fantastic new world of Power BI that I was exploring, I would quite often have to revisit the same guides from youtube and bookmarks. 

The techniques that were becoming core to my models and dashboards were being quite often copied and pasted and, of course, adjusted to fit my needs. Eventually, I became part of an agile reporting team (consisting of like-minded people from across different departments). As we worked during sprints, we made a point of documenting some of the standard techniques needed for our daily work, and it’s from this practice, I decided to establish this site.

This site serves two selfish purposes. 
To help document every facet of Power BI, and to ensure I’ve learnt the intricacies of what I’m documenting.