Scope of the possible with Power BI

Power BI

overview

Published

November 13, 2025

Previous attendees have said…

Three random comments from previous attendees

I thought this was one of the best training sessions I have ever been to. The presenter was clearly very knowledgeable but also explained things at an appropriate level. We were quickly into the session, no messing about with 20 minutes wasted at the start telling us where the fire exits were, what the learning outcomes were going to be or how this training fitted into a holistic visionary overview of how we were going to transform our inner selves in line with corporate targets #6, #8 and #15 or whatever. The pace was great, the examples good and it really showed the power of Power BI as a potential tool to use in future. The presenter kept up with the questions in the chat better than I have ever seen anyone do before and it felt like an engaging session with loads of benefits. This was my first engagement with KIND training in what is week 3 of my new job and it’s set the bar high for future sessions :) Superb, chapeau, sir. Definitely enthused to come to more KIND sessions and get stuck into learning Power BI.
very informative, was going a little fast but appreciate it was an overview but gave me enough info to wet my appetite
Interesting but frustrating that the complexity of licensing and apparent paywalls mean that it is unlikely to be possible to use Power BI in reality but was a really useful session to actually get that info as my local IT have said thay have not had much training on it so can’t help much.

newish (c.2015)
based on Microsoft’s SQL reporting products
- proprietary, closed-source, paid-for
integrates functions from several other Microsoft data products (bits of Excel, PowerPivot, PowerQuery…)
produces interactive dashboards

there is a lot of fluff talked about Power BI
- e.g. elaborate visualisations, fancy real-time data products…
Power BI in general is promoted as a no-code tool
- that’s just not true, as we’ll see
Power BI has a sales-y focus
- that conceals some of its most useful properties
so Power BI, as a platform, requires some translation to the complicated reality of health and social care data
- and Power BI offers real strengths in managing and exploiting our data, even when the pain-points are taken into account

We’ll use a pair of Excel files. These are based on three datasets from the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data portal:

GP practice data
Name	PracticeListSize	Postcode	HBName	GPCluster	Code
Riverside Medical Practice	10061	IV3 5PW	NHS Highland	NHSH (North) Inverness B	55841
Dr P M R Von Kaehne	472	PA24 8AQ	NHS Highland	Highland Subset 5	84449
The Lennox Practice	4939	G83 0UA	NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde	Alexandria	85225

really needs clean and tidy data
publication can be complicated and expensive
steepening pain curve. Easy to start projects, but more involved analysis is messy
complex IG landscape
messy skills development journey