Why bother with Power BI?

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

• I was blown away at the map example and had not seen anything like this before
• A simple and comprehensive introduction to why PBI is a good tool. It gives me a reasonable understanding of why I should look into learning PBI.
• An eye-opener to the utility of Power BI in aggregating and presenting data

Session outline

• an overview of Power BI
• practice demo
• strengths and weaknesses
• how to use Power BI for good?
• next steps and training

A brief overview of Power BI

• new-ish, c.2015
• integrates several existing Microsoft products (bits of Excel, PowerPivot, PowerQuery, various SQL reporting tools)
• 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

Import data from Excel

preview the data

Data preview

work with the data in Power BI

Table view in Power BI

tidy/wrangle the data in Power Query

Transform data

add a map visual

Add a map visual

populate with our data

Bubble map of Scotland’s GP practices

add a column graph

Column graph

populate with drag and drop

Column graph of Scotland’s largest GP practices

add slicer

Slice to show specific NHS boards

slicers change our visualisations

Resulting filtered bubble map for NHS Dumfries and Galloway

add a numeric summary

Add cards containing quantitative summaries of data

publish

See preview - although note that access might require permission

Strengths

• potentially has the power to get lots of new good out of existing data
• much easier to build simple dashboards compared to competitors
• good (but often non-free) scaling journey from individual to group
• good journey towards real-time data

Weaknesses

• 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 and requires investigating before building a product
• complex IG picture across Scotland, so please get official guidance early

Power BI for good

• a terminal analysis product, so don’t plan to take data from Power BI
• best with simple statistics - a specific warning here about QI
• great for sharing with a well-defined group
• an excellent way of guarding your spreadsheets
• useful for moving away from holding data on shared drives etc