Why bother with Power BI?
Power BI
overview
Previous attendees have said…
- 20 previous attendees have left feedback
- 100% would recommend this session to a colleague
- 100% said that this session was pitched correctly
Three random comments from previous attendees
- This was my first experience of any of these courses and also the first time I saw Brendan. I must say I was very impressed. Brendan’s presentation style and interaction with the groups comments was a joy to watch. The session itself was very informative and got a lot of information across in only 30 minutes. Also the fact that there are so many links in the notes to follow up on is a great added bonus. I will gradually be getting my whole team signed up for this and similar courses. Many thanks to Brendan for making this information available. Mark Menzies (NHS GG&C)
- Overall very positive, whipped through everything, did what was needed. As a person who is easily distracted, I do get a bit distracted when you reply to comments and go on tiny tangents involving programming with unfamiliar names and acronyms, but I get that the vibe overall is that you want people to be involved and commenting etc. I really appreciate these sessions as I try to get my head round new things.
- It was a very good introduction to Power BI, and helped me understand what it was and how it could be useful in my workplace. I don’t have any experience with coding and think Power BI could be quite useful for those without coding experience. Would be keen to learn more.
Welcome
- welcome to Why bother with Power BI?
- this session is 🥬 - a non-technical introduction for pre-beginners
- if you can’t access the chat, you might need to join our Teams channel: tinyurl.com/kindnetwork
The KIND network
- a social learning space for staff working with knowledge, information, and data across health, social care, and housing in Scotland
- we offer social support, free training, mentoring, community events, …
- Teams channel / mailing list
Session outline
- two minute overview of Power BI
- strengths and weaknesses
- making Power BI work for you
- next steps and training
A brief overview of Power BI
- new
- integrates several existing Microsoft products (bits of Excel, PowerPivot, PowerQuery…)
- produces interactive dashboards
- proprietary, closed-source, paid-for
Central idea
- data is complicated
- good data analysis helps make services better
- but predicting what data users will need is hard
Why are users so fussy about their data?
- data can be used to answer lots of different kinds of questions
- answering which/when questions
- seeing effects of changes
- comparing different areas
- looking at services over time
- …
Power BI
- lets users re-arrange their data to suit (interactive)
- provides a standard way of accessing data from lots of sources (data hub)
- scales really well (dashboard example)
Power BI demo
take a spreadsheet and load that data
preview the data
work with the data in Power BI
tidy/wrangle the data in Power Query
### add a map visual 
populate with our data
add a column graph
populate with drag and drop
add slicer
slicers change our visualisations
add a numeric summary
publish
See preview - although note that access might require permission
Five top tips
- potentially has the power to get lots of new good out of existing data
- Power BI needs tidy input data - so use Excel tables etc
- don’t believe the no-code lies - you’ll need some DAX and Power Query M
- publishing is complicated and potentially expensive, so needs investigating before building a product
- complex IG picture across Scotland, so please get official guidance early
Chat, queries, questions
- Teams channel: tinyurl.com/kindnetwork
- weekly email update: tinyurl.com/kindupdate
- Training mini-site: tinyurl.com/kindtrain