Conducting the agent
Building a Power BI model with Claude Code
The course
Nine short series, about 60 interactive lessons, built on a real Power BI project made with a coding agent. Every example comes from the project's own files, and the project itself is free to download. It's described in the next section.
The Power BI project
The course is built around one report: Critical Raw Materials Intelligence. It follows the materials Europe's industry depends on, such as cobalt, lithium, nickel and rare earths: who produces them, how much Europe imports and from where, what battery demand will need, and how far each figure can be trusted.
All figures are illustrative, made up to look plausible, and every page says so.
Commodity
The overview: of eleven materials, where should you worry first?
Commodity: world
One material at a time: production, reserves, prices, and who controls supply.
Commodity: EU
Europe's side: how much it imports, and how concentrated its suppliers are.
Battery materials
What battery demand will need, by chemistry and scenario, and where recycling helps.
Trade
EU imports month by month, and supplier concentration against the 65% ceiling.
Data assurance
The page that checks the others: refreshes, reconciliations, the release gate and the measure register.
Fabric migration
A row-by-row comparison before the report moves to Microsoft Fabric.
Under the hood: a star schema of 32 tables and 53 relationships, loaded through three Power Query layers, with row-level security on four roles and a basis line and short explanation behind every tile. It's saved as a Power BI Project, a folder of plain-text files, so a coding agent can read and change it. The kit also holds the specs it was built from, the seed project, the scripts that generated it and a validator that runs 1,533 checks on every build.
Work with me
I'm Liz Barnes, a senior business analyst and data analyst in Amsterdam. Elizabeth Cecilia is my teaching name. I built this course and the Power BI project behind it with Claude Code, using the same rules and checks it teaches. If you want this way of working in your own team, I take on contract work through Special Dimension. Four things I can help with:
Set up an agent-assisted Power BI workflow for your team
A seed project, the rules the agent works by, and the checks it runs on every build. The course covers this in Three in the loop.
Add guardrails to AI-assisted BI work you already do
A validator that runs 1,533 checks on each build before anyone relies on the numbers. The course covers this in The validator.
Plan a move from Excel and Power Query to Fabric
What moves, in what order, and what can stay as it is. The course covers this in The move to Fabric.
Map a process or a regulation, and explain it interactively
Business processes mapped end to end, and reporting regulations explained in plain language, then turned into short interactive explainers like the lessons in this course, so your team can learn them at its own pace.
To talk about any of these, message me on LinkedIn.
Message me on LinkedInHiring a business analyst?
A business analyst sits between the people who need answers and the people who build the systems that give them: developers, data engineers and, now, AI agents. They find the real question, write it down precisely enough to build, and check that what comes back is right.
The tools on the build side change every few years. The analyst's work doesn't. Fabric only became generally available at the end of 2023, so nobody has many years of it. Asking for years of one tool screens out people who can do the job. Ask about the work instead:
Hire a business analyst for the judgement, not the tool.
A tool takes weeks to learn. Knowing what to ask, and how to check the answer, takes years. With AI agents doing more of the building, that judgement matters more, not less.
To see that judgement at work, try Reading the Tiles: a real report, read tile by tile through a business analyst's eyes.