Scope of the possible with Power BI

Previous attendees have said…

• 17 previous attendees have left feedback
• 100% would recommend this session to a colleague
• 88% said that this session was pitched correctly

Three random comments from previous attendees

• Very well delivered session from knowledgeable enthusiastic host. It’s a personal preference of mine that questions are asked for at planed intervals, rather than inviting interruptions or stopping to answer questions in the chat. Helps with flow of the session and less jarring for viewers.
• Excellent session that removed the fear of giving Power BI a go
• Fab intro into what Power BI can be used for. Brendan explained everything really well.

Welcome!

• this session is a non-technical overview designed for service leads
• pdf version of the session slides

Session outline

• Why Power BI, and why this session?
• Power BI demo - build a simple dashboard
• Strengths and weaknesses
  • obvious
  • less obvious
• Alternatives
• Skill development

Power BI?

• new (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

Why this session?

• 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

Power BI demo

• using tidied of the GP practice size dataset from April 2024
  • GP practice size data
  • Demographic data

Note this data is cleaned

Name	PracticeListSize	Postcode	HBName	GPCluster	Code
Mossend Surgery	6350	ML4 1DQ	NHS Lanarkshire	Bellshill	62011
The Stonelaw Practice	13583	G73 2PQ	NHS Lanarkshire	Rutherglen	60092
Simpson Medical Group	8654	EH48 2SS	NHS Lothian	West Lothian West	78132

Load some data

Lots of different data loading options

Preview

Friendly tools for previewing data

Add to a map

Clever use of commercial postcode data

Add interactions

Visualisations are interactive

Add more visuals

30-odd built in, hundreds of free additional visuals, thousands of (often dodgy) commercial add-ins

Add more data

Totally different data, but harmonised process for loading

Re-shape that data

Neatly-integrated PowerQuery, gives loads of scope for tidying and fixing data

Data modelling tools

Full suite of relational tools for the more ambitious projects

Pre-packed visuals

Microsoft’s Tornado chart

Demographics

These can be cross filtered to give national/board/practice level insights

Strengths

• by far the easiest way of producing interactive data products
• great tools for tidying data
• good for iterative projects
• data hubbing / self-service data
• scaling
• potential to manage complex and sensitive data on existing infrastructure

Weaknesses

• 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