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

• Heard of Power BI but having no experience, it was good to be able to see what this software / application does and how it works. I doubt I will need to use but at least I know what it is for.
• 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.
• Gave an insight of advancement in tech that hopefully Procurement can use the same principle with products and logistics using the clinical model

Session outline

• an overview of Power BI
• quick production demo
• five ways that Power BI might help
• so what’s the catch?
• 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 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

Five ways that Power BI might help you

1: making data fun makes data useful

• from this to this
• a great way of making more out of the data you already hold

2: you need a data hub

• Provides a standard way of accessing data from lots of sources
• call this a data hub
• 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

3: the easiest way to build scalable dashboards

• lower barriers to entry than competitors
• scales really well (dashboard example)
• scaling isn’t free though…

4: don’t repeat yourself

• in Excel, when the data changes you need to re-do your work
• not so in Power BI: reproducible data loading pipeline
• possible route towards real-time data

5: let users serve up their own data

• bored of slicing up spreadsheets and emailing them to people? Let them do it themselves
• Power BI is a terminal product: it’s meant to be used at the end of a data journey
  • don’t expect to do much fancy exporting from BI

Weaknesses

• Power BI needs tidy input data - so use Excel tables, and expect to get good at Power Query 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
• a terminal analysis product, so don’t plan to take data from Power BI
• struggles with more complex statistical tools - a specific warning here about QI