Developing effective visuals is part science, part art. Sometimes we developers get too focused on the data side – the science – of using Power BI. Focusing our attention on data prep, manipulation and the power of DAX, we all but forget other audiences need to make sense of this data. We need to present our results in ways that help the business uncover trends, patterns and insights.
Visualizations help management and other end users to quickly and easily understand the data in your reports. Simply doing a data dump and calling it a visualization is a huge disservice to Power BI and the hard work you’ve done to code and create tables. In short, design matters and pretty pictures count.
View our on-demand webinar to learn practical, real-world techniques for creating Power BI visuals that serve as effective data discovery tools.
Demos include
- Achieving multiple results with a dynamic prompt
- Using conditional color coding
- Creating visually rich report tooltips
Presenter
Patrick Powers
Trainer and Consultant
Senturus, Inc.
Patrick has 20 years of experience in training, business intelligence and data analytics.
Read moreMachine transcript
0:08
Greetings and welcome to this latest installment of the Senturus Knowledge series. Today we are going to be presenting the topic of putting the visual in Power BI visualizations.
0:20
Before we get into the meat of the presentation, a few housekeeping items.
0:24
Feel free to use the GoToWebinar control panel to make the session interactive, and while we’re usually able to respond to your questions while the webinar is in progress, and we encourage you to enter your and submit your questions via the questions panel, and in the control panel.
0:40
If we’re somehow unable to reply to all the questions during the session, we will post a written response document to Senturus.com.
0:50
Which leads us to the question that we get early and often throughout the presentation is can I get a copy of today’s presentation? And the answer is absolutely. It’s already up and available on Senturus.com/resources or you go to senturus.com and select the Resources tab, and head to the Resources Library.
1:08
Alternatively, you can click the link that was just posted in the GoToWebinar control panel. And while you’re there be sure to bookmark our resource library as it has tons of valuable content, addressing all things, business analytics.
1:22
Our agenda today will do a couple of quick introductions, and then we’ll get into the heart of the presentation, stick around through a brief Senturus overview for those of you who may not be familiar with our organization, and what we do.
1:36
And some great additional free resources for the always informative question and answer session at the end of the presentation.
1:47
So, today’s overview is going to be good. Diving into the agenda, a little bit more, Patrick is going to go into reports versus visualizations. What’s the difference there?
2:00
Going beyond textual based reports, making your data useful to discuss targeted visualizations and he’ll demonstrate a lot of this functionality for you.
2:13
I’m pleased to be joined today by my colleague, Patrick Powers, who’s a senior trainer and consultant here at Senturus. Patrick brings over 20 years of experience in business intelligence and data analytics.
2:26
He’s a Tableau certified associate, as well as a Cognos expert, whose project experience goes back. All the way to version six.
2:33
He is also well versed on Hyperion and Business Objects has certifications, include multiple programming languages, including Java, and C plus, and Database certification, MS SQ and is also very proficient in the Microsoft stack, including Power BI, as you’ll see here today. My name is Mike Weinhauer. I’m a director here at Senturus and I wear a lot of different hats. One of them being hosting our webinar series.
2:59
So before we dive into the content today, we always like to get a finger on the pulse of our audience, so we’re going to ask a quick question here.
3:08
The question is, how often do you choose a table or a matrix, and IE a text based visualization, to show your data, and is it all the time? More than half. About half less than half.
3:19
Or rarely.
3:20
So go ahead and get your votes, and then we’ll get a feel for how visual our audiences, and maybe we can move the needle on this a little bit today.
3:32
Everybody’s getting their answers in here. We got about two thirds there. We’ll give you guys a few more seconds to get your answers, then go ahead and make your choice.
3:45
Right, looks like that’s about all we’re going to get, so I’m going to share the results now.
3:50
So, 15% of you, all the time, quarter, more than half of the time, another third, about half the time, and then really kind of rounding it out. You get 23% about a quarter that tend to choose visualizations overtaxed, So, I mean, that kind of tells you that a lot of cases, There’s still a lot of text and cross tabs and whatnot going out there, so that’s interesting insights.
4:15
So again, hopefully we can help you show you show you how to do improve on that, make your visualizations more visual using Power BI. And with that, I’m going to hand the floor and the microphone over to Patrick. Go ahead.
4:28
Thank you, Mike. So, as we just saw in the poll, what are those numbers add up to about 70.
4:35
Oh, 77% of you, 77% of you are looking at starting off with a visual, with a table or a matrix.
4:48
And, and that’s great when the data is perfect for that.
4:52
But let us start with a simple concept here.
4:55
Are we building reports, or are we building visualizations and dashboards?
5:00
You know, it seems like such a simple question, but a lot of folks struggle with it.
5:06
Depending on how long you’ve been doing this, you know, Mike said I’ve been doing it since Meehan, Betty White. We’re talking about the invention of sliced bread.
5:15
It’s what we had.
5:17
We had green bar reports coming off of a line printer, and we’re used to doing that, But, that doesn’t work in today’s self-service. Hey, I’m on a mobile device. Hey, I’m trying to give this to a senior manager.
5:34
I’m trying to give this to a non-technical person.
5:37
They need access to not only what happened, but what will happen as quickly and easily as possible, we’re looking for trends, we’re looking for outliers, and they have to be able to see those results, right?
5:51
Reports can tend to be an overload of numbers, and, and, when we talk about Power BI, we’re talking about folks coming into it, coming into it from Excel, coming into it from Access, coming into it from these other Microsoft tools.
6:10
Or DBAs, coming into this.
6:13
People who are used to type it in SQL and getting back end result set, we have to live up to this promise of visual data.
6:24
And this, of course, this falls on to you, all right, falls on to you, but that’s not necessarily your background.
6:32
Your background might be programming with the amount of DAX that has to get written. Sometimes, a lot of this gets handed off to programmers, and even the Power Excel users.
6:42
There are some people out there who can make big sell, sing, and dance with formulas, and functions, and look ups, and this, and that.
6:53
So how do we deliver that?
6:56
Even though we have these wonderful things in Power BI, it doesn’t mean that design or esthetics should take a backseat.
7:04
You know, let’s look at this example I’ve got right here.
7:07
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the data on the left.
7:12
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.
7:14
If I’m a developer, if I’m a sequel PERS, and if I’m an Excel person, hey, it works. I see what I need! Great.
7:23
But if I’m a sales manager, and I’m trying to look at this on my phone, and I’m trying to quickly see which countries are doing well, which countries are doing poorly, and I’m looking for those trends, Well, the one on the right definitely gives me that in a much easier to read format. It’s quicker. It’s easier. I can see where my dollars are going, where they’re coming from.
7:49
So we need to make sure that we’re taking a new mindset.
7:55
This isn’t, for us, it’s for somebody else.
8:00
Most of the folks creating workbooks and dashboards with Power BI are creating them for someone else.
8:08
And typically, those are non-technical, non-data centric people.
8:15
So, we only have to give them what they want.
8:18
We have to give them what they need, and sometimes, they don’t know what that is, so we have to think smarter.
8:25
For all of you out there, who are Linux, lubbers, Hey, I’ve got, I’ve got a machine right here. Running’ meant, so I’m right there with you.
8:33
Let me say, I put myself into the same category, as most of the folks that I’m talking about right now.
8:39
I’ll build the one on the left, because I just want to get to the data.
8:44
So even I get into that, that mindset, but let’s take a look at this.
8:49
Our friend Linus Torvalds got a great quote from him.
8:54
I mean, if I was stranded on an island, and the only way to get off that island, was to make a pretty UI, I’d die there.
9:02
And I know there’s at least one of that 77%, who just answered, who is having a nice little chuckle at that and going, yep, that’s me. I’d be dying on that island, too.
9:14
All right.
9:16
I’d probably be right there with you, me in my volleyball. And we’d be having a great time dying on the island.
9:23
So, how do we do this for any tool, for any tool?
9:29
Too many spleens of the mouse there?
9:32
Goodness, I’m not playing golf.
9:35
We have to make data useful.
9:37
And the number one success factor, hands down, is people use it.
9:46
They accept what we give them, and they use it.
9:49
And to meet that goal.
9:51
We have to have data that’s relevant, that’s accurate, and that’s timely, and most importantly, well understood.
10:00
And the well understood is where we’re coming at this from today.
10:05
Because we can make sure that with our Power BI visualizations, we can focus on that right format.
10:12
Hopefully, hopefully, our infrastructure is handle and the rest, hopefully the ETL group, and hopefully our data sources, are relevant, accurate, and timely.
10:25
So it’s up to us to handle that well understood, As I said, a moment ago, we don’t always know who’s going to be using this.
10:38
But when we do, we want to target this to the person in our organization.
10:45
Here are two good examples.
10:49
These are two very different end users, and in this case, we’re letting the data guide us to what we need.
10:58
On the left, we’ve got a funnel.
11:01
This is the perfect for the sales manager who needs to quickly login.
11:06
Hey, how’s the pipeline doing for the month?
11:09
I just need to see this one thing, and I’m moving on.
11:13
Then I got this box plot.
11:15
This is for the analyst.
11:16
This is the one who’s trying to figure out what kind of impact is discount having on anything.
11:23
Then we add to this marketing users, executive dashboard, operation users, HR users, just the whole organization.
11:32
And they’ll all have different needs.
11:35
They’ll all consume and interact with data in different ways.
11:39
And that’s your job.
11:40
Making sure that you’re giving them something that’s well understood, and that they can work from.
11:47
And that’s not always going to be tables and Matrix objects.
11:53
We got to think beyond the numbers.
11:55
We got to think about how this data impacts our organization.
12:02
To that, I’m going to show you some demos today. I’m going to do three demos for you, today.
12:08
The first one is going to be on doing, doing a dashboard style report.
12:18
That allows us to have multiple measures selectable by user.
12:23
Because, remember, we don’t always know somebody’s screen, real estate size, so trying to put four visualizations into one screen may not look too good when they’re looking at it on a, on a Cognos.
12:35
So this way, we can hit four at once, and have it all fit into one nice window.
12:44
Then we’re going to look at tool tips.
12:47
How can we get the best out of tool tips?
12:49
How can I make essentially, vision, this type of, of reports that I don’t have to have multiple pages, somebody can quickly get to what they want dynamically.
13:02
Then lastly, we’re going to see, how do I make my Excel users happy?
13:08
You know what? I got people who want tables.
13:11
Great, but let’s still leverage what we can in Power BI to make it visual and make it quick and easy for them to find what they need.
13:23
All right, I hope you’re all excited and all ready to go here.
13:28
It is October, I think, still, maybe.
13:32
We’ll find out.
13:34
So here we go.
13:35
I’ve got my Power BI open, ready to go. I have taken the Liberty and pre generated some things here.
13:45
For this first one, we’re going to create a table.
13:48
And before anybody freaks out and thinks, I’m being anti DACs, absolutely not.
13:54
We’re going to create a lot of DACs in this just to make it. The very first thing is we’re going to create a new tape.
14:00
And we’re going to use a DAX function to do that.
14:03
And I’ve got, I have got a set of text already written, just so I can simply copy and paste, so I don’t have to be embarrassed in front of any of you trying to type.
14:17
Nobody wants to watch me type.
14:20
I’m going to create this new table.
14:24
What this table is doing is we’re creating a table that has two columns, the measure name, choose Me one column, the measure name, then the values that we want shown on the visualization, So we’re going to let them choose from some of sales, average sales, same, profit, or average profit, and I’m using the data table function in just a simple string function.
14:50
Either did just comma question, which I’ll answer right now. I can absolutely provide this workbook.
14:56
If anybody is interested in the workbook afterwards, I have no problem with that.
15:01
So a weekend make this available, or you can have it for reference.
15:07
Now, I’m going to be using profit on here.
15:10
And in order to do so, I needed to create it as a column.
15:15
So I’ve also gone ahead and I’ve pre generated a Profit column.
15:21
And it’s nothing fancy. Sales amount minus the total product cost, so we can see what’s going on.
15:27
It’s formatted as currency.
15:30
And we’re all set.
15:32
Now we need a measure to allow them to select what they want.
15:38
So I’m going to make sure that my new table selected Dynamic Measure.
15:43
And I’m going to create a new measure.
15:45
And this one, again, there’s no way in heck, I’m going to try and type this live.
15:51
I’m using the Switch function, and I’m using it in conjunction with has one value, and has one value, is going to make sure that I’m only returning one back.
16:04
And then we’ll switch between the values in that table, and what’s going to be in the slicer that we use.
16:12
And we’re going to go ahead, and we’re going to get what we need. So they’ll be able to choose from four different ones.
16:19
And that’s where you’re all going.
16:20
Ooh, ah, how nifty Wait.
16:25
There’s more.
16:27
So let’s go ahead and let’s start setting this up. I’m going to put a line visualization out here.
16:35
Say, I’m not starting with a text, or Art, or a table, or a matrix. I’m starting with a line.
16:42
I’m going to resize it about to their, cause I’m going to have some slices over here.
16:49
I’m using the standard, good, old stuff that we’ve all seen with Power BI here.
16:54
So this isn’t a fancy dataset, and I’ll go into my order date, go into the Date Hierarchy, and I’m taking the year and the month to the access drop Zones.
17:08
It can year and month there.
17:10
Now, I’m going to take my Select and measure.
17:15
And I’m going to put that on Values.
17:20
We’re showing the default value right now.
17:24
This is the default value for our DACs that we created. I’m going to expand out in the next level and there we are at the month level.
17:34
Look at that.
17:37
Now we’re going to make it dynamic.
17:40
I’m going to add a slicer to this.
17:44
I put a slicer on here.
17:46
And in my slicer, I’ll take my Measure.
17:55
I want Measure Name.
17:59
There’s my choices, and I’m going to add a second slicer here just to give them some flexibility. And for that, I’m going to add in country.
18:11
So, look at this.
18:15
I’ve got the ability to change between Boer, different visualizations as well as my country’s one of my country’s none of my countries, whatever I want, all in the space of a single visualization or different needs met.
18:42
You know, what would be really cool.
18:45
What, what would be really cool?
18:47
What if we made this title dynamic too?
18:50
CVs are the little things that developers don’t always think about.
18:55
These are the little things that get us that acceptance Sydney usage by our end users. So I’m going to select my line.
19:04
I’m going to go to Formatting.
19:05
I’m going to come down here to Title.
19:07
And for the title, I’m going to use a function.
19:13
I’m going to base it on the field value, and I’m going to base it on the field, value, of measure name.
19:21
Look at that.
19:23
So now I see it up the top. I’ve got my slice hers.
19:27
There we go.
19:29
That’s our first demo.
19:32
Hopefully you all like that.
19:34
Again, that’s where you are supposed to be, oohing and ahhing, I know you are, I can, I can sense it.
19:40
Let’s take a look now at using tool tips.
19:47
Let’s see how we can use tool tips affect fetch efficiently and effectively.
19:53
It’s easier to say than do.
19:56
So, I’m going to start a new page, and for this one, I’m going to start with a clustered column.
20:06
I’m going to resize it to fit my canvas, and this is going to be my main, my main visualization.
20:13
For this one, I’m going to go to fact Internet Sales.
20:20
I’m going to take sales them out, add this.
20:27
And, for my dim order date, I’m going to add my year.
20:32
And now I’ve just got my Sales by year.
20:34
And when we hover over this, hey, there it is.
20:38
There’s my basic tool tip, doesn’t tell me much, doesn’t say much.
20:43
We can do better than this.
20:45
This is acceptable.
20:47
But we can do better.
20:49
So I’m going to create a new one.
20:50
I’m going to rename it, tool tip.
20:54
That’s right, live typing.
20:56
And we’re going to set the size of this page, since we’re going to use it as a hover over results.
21:03
We want to set the size of the page.
21:06
And my formatting, I’m going to Page Size.
21:10
I’m going to set it to tooltip. Yep, there’s one in there right, therefore it.
21:16
Let’s see how this is going to look. We’re going to go up to view.
21:20
I’m going to go to my page view actual size. So that is the size of the canvas that they will see when they hover over.
21:33
And we’re going to go to the name of this.
21:35
Go to Page Information.
21:38
There it is, Tooltip, Life is Good, and in the same section.
21:43
I’m going to tell it.
21:45
This sheet is a tool tip.
21:48
I need to turn on that slider.
21:52
Let’s build our visualization.
21:53
Now for this, I’m going to add a pie.
21:57
Nothing fancy. I’m going to resize it to fit the entire tooltip window.
22:03
Wanted to fit everything, and from dam customer.
22:09
You do, do.
22:11
I’m going to add in my country to the legend, and from fact, Internet Sales.
22:22
I’m going to add in my sales amount. Now, is this a perfect pie chart? Of course, not.
22:27
We really should, I’ll have something a little fancier, but, we want to see how this starts.
22:36
Now, when I hover over, I’ve got my basic tool tip.
22:42
Hmm.
22:43
We need to change this.
22:48
Click on this.
22:52
Oh, what did I do wrong today?
23:02
That’s on, that’s on report page. There we go.
23:07
Don’t you love live demos? Aren’t they? Wonderful? There we go.
23:11
Or page, Auto.
23:15
I’m back here.
23:18
Tool Tip, Court Page, and Tool tip, there we go, cut off.
23:26
Sometimes I got to make sure my own steps are right, Donna.
23:31
Now, when I hover over each bar, I see the breakout by year.
23:39
You’ll notice those numbers are changing as I hover over each one.
23:45
Even though my little baby, 2020, here, I can get.
23:49
And so now, I’ve managed to put 2 into 1.
23:52
Again, making it visual, making it more exciting for our users.
23:58
What we have to be careful about is where we use that.
24:03
This one doesn’t necessarily work well here, if I were to turn it on here, and I were to say, Hey, let’s use the tool tip on this one, too.
24:19
Is that going to be as useful? Yeah, maybe not.
24:25
Maybe on some of these, it is.
24:27
But not always. So we want to make sure that we do check things like that. We want to make sure that we’re looking at, what is this using?
24:35
Is this using the default tool tip, or is it using one that’s specified as a tool tip?
24:46
So that’s two down.
24:48
I got 1 last 1 for you here today.
24:51
It looks like this is going to be a quick one.
24:54
And what I wanted to do in this last one is I want to talk about, OK, if we’re going to make tables, let’s make them stand out.
25:05
Let’s just not give them straight up, boring tables. Let’s give them something to talk about.
25:13
So I’m going to start off with a matrix.
25:16
I’m going to start off with a matrix.
25:19
As 77% of you tend to do.
25:24
And for this, I’m going to go to Dim Product.
25:29
And I’m going to add in Product Name on the rows.
25:35
And from order date, I’m going to put calendar year on the columns.
25:40
And here I’ve got just a straight Matrix going.
25:43
And lastly, sales amount for my values.
25:53
And this is where most people would stop.
25:56
Again, is there anything wrong with this?
25:58
Now, totally fine.
26:02
But how can I quickly find trends?
26:06
How can I quickly find patterns? How can I see what’s going on?
26:12
Well, for that, we can just use a little DACs.
26:16
I’m going to create, on fact, Internet sales.
26:21
And I’m going to create a new measure.
26:25
This one.
26:27
Going to be product, font color.
26:32
Product, font color.
26:35
So, same thing as before.
26:43
Same thing as before.
26:46
I’m using Switch.
26:47
And in this case, I’m just putting in some business accepted values.
26:53
If it’s less than 500, format it this way, if it’s over 100,000, format it this way.
27:01
If it’s neither, here’s my default.
27:05
So again, just using the Switch command, nothing exciting, and nothing fancy.
27:12
Now I’ve got this product font color.
27:17
And over here, my Visualization Pane.
27:20
Go to Sales Amount.
27:22
I’m going to go to Conditional Formatting, Font Color.
27:28
We are going to choose Field value, and we’re going to base it on product font color.
27:38
So, look at that same visualization, same visualization, but now, I’m making it easy for somebody to quickly see, hey, these products, not so good, especially when I compare it to the very next year.
27:59
And here I see, wow, how did we go from 6900 to 310?
28:05
It stands out.
28:07
It jumps right out at us and says, look, here’s what we’re doing well. And here’s what we’re not doing well.
28:14
Now, I’d like to show you one more. I don’t have the demo for it. The demo is going to take a little too long, unfortunately.
28:22
But some of you are probably looking at this going, Yeah, this is nice, but how could I quickly see if we’ve done better or worse over a previous time period?
28:32
And some of you may be familiar that there is a KPI visualization available.
28:38
There is an actual KPI one.
28:41
But that one, it’s, it’s OK.
28:44
The KPI I want in here doesn’t really tell us a lot, so we can always create a custom one.
28:53
And here, here, again, started with a table and I’m just looking at my, my region and my current and prior year sales.
29:03
That’s an exciting here.
29:05
I’ve got a couple of calculated fields for those where I get my current year sales, my prayer, Cheryl, sales, and my variance.
29:15
We want to see that by current year sales, I’m taking the order year and I’m getting the sales amount.
29:24
Prior year sales very similar. I’m just doing a convert to an integer on that.
29:30
Then I’m creating variance as a subtraction of those two.
29:34
But here it is, the addition of the arrow, making it visual, Makena trends stand out.
29:44
And when we look, and we see that almost every one of our regions is up, except central, that jumps out, and when we see that its $1100 under last year, that jumps out at us.
30:02
Now, just to tell you to create this one, I did create a new table.
30:08
There’s a table here called Images.
30:11
And, again, I’m happy to provide this.
30:16
What it has is it has a value for the up arrow, a value for the down arrow, and then essentially an image just from the internet.
30:24
This could, of course, be a local image on your server which would give you a much, much less convoluted URL.
30:33
And then in there for that column, so the column is arrow.
30:41
We’re just doing a lookup value.
30:43
We’re doing a lookup value of the image URL, the image KPI value, and assigning the arrow.
30:51
And the KPI arrow is looking at variance if the variance is greater than zero, a sign at this arrow.
30:58
If it’s not assign it this arrow.
31:01
So not, not a horrible amount of work, not too challenging.
31:06
You can see that this one required many, many fields to be created, but I think the end result really goes a long way to keeping our users happy, making things well understood, having things stand out, Having things look good.
31:25
So I want to remind you all about that. Making things look good is important.
31:29
And since we’ve got a couple of minutes here, I would like to take a moment here.
31:36
I’ll open up another instance doing great on time.
31:41
And Mike, I’m not watching the questions.
31:45
So if there’s anything while this is opening, nothing there. Just a lot of interest in getting the file, So.
31:55
No problem.
31:56
So I want to show you, this is the completed workbook from our intermediate visualization class, where we do go into a lot of these things, A lot of the screenshots you saw today, come from this class.
32:10
Where are we talk about all of these different things, and you learn all these different things in our class.
32:16
How we can make things more visual, how we can filter well, how to really use sliders and things like interactions, where I’ve got certain things controlled, and other things not controlled.
32:29
So a lot of different, a lot of different ways of showing data relationships.
32:35
Link to reports, the funnel that you saw earlier.
32:38
So I’d encourage you, if you are interested in making things more visual, we do have this in this visualization class.
32:48
We also go into bookmarks, so I can show how to do a bookmark here.
32:53
You can go to different time periods, things to take a look at. So that’s about all I have for today, Mike.
33:03
Yeah, that’s great stuff, Patrick.
33:04
Um, certainly, and that leads into the next slide, if you want to jump back to the deck, stick around and definitely enter questions into the question panel, We will answer them once we run through these next couple of slides, which give you a little background and interests.
33:22
Talk about free upcoming events and other resources. So, please, stick around and put those questions in there.
33:28
But, moving from your traditional legacy text and matrix style reports to a self-service visual type of culture is more than a technology shift. It’s a culture shift. And, as you can see, we have experts here.
33:45
Its interests that are conversant in the three major tool platforms like Cognos, Power BI, and Tableau. So, take Patrick, for example, he can traverse all three of those and go, you know, I like to say off roading pretty easily. So, if you’re interested in kind of diving into that stuff, we do have this new Power BI class.
34:04
It’s an instructor led online class, It’s on December 17th, and you can link to it there, or just go to senturus.com, and you can find it in our class schedule, along with everything else.
34:15
And I do believe I am teaching that one, so you get to have a whole day of listening to my voice and bad jokes. There you go. So if you’ve found Patrick humorous insightful or both, then that’s your ticket.
34:28
Couple of quick slides about Senturus before we get into the Q and A, we focus our expertise solely on business intelligence, the depth of knowledge across the entire BI stack that is unrivaled in the industry.
34:43
And, we are known by our clients, for providing clarity from the chaos of complex business requirements, disparate and ever changing data sources, and constantly moving targets, and changing regulatory environments. We made a name for ourselves based on our strength in bridging the gap between IT and business users.
35:01
We deliver solutions that give you access to a reliable analysis, ready data across your organization, enabling you to quickly and easily get answers, the point of impact in the form of the decisions you make, and the actions you take, That’s what Patrick brought up here.
35:14
You can see we have a full spectrum of BI services, everything from the front end, to the back end, and everything in between, including training and mentoring, or consultants, or leading experts in the field of analytics with years of pragmatic real-world expertise.
35:27
So that’s like Patrick are emblematic of what we have on the center as team.
35:32
They he has experienced both in the real-world working for organizations and companies. As well as his 20 years plus now, of teaching and consulting with our various clients. In fact, we’re so confident in our team and our methodology.
35:47
We back our projects with a, an industry, unique, 100% Money Back guarantee.
35:52
And we’ve been doing this for quite a while, coming up on two decades as a company here, we, and again, we’ve been focused solely on business intelligence. We work across the spectrum from Fortune 500 clients down to the mid-market, you probably recognize. Many of the logos there on our next slide here, solving business problems across virtually every industry and functional area, including the Office of Finance Sales and Marketing Manufacturing, Operations, HR, and IT.
36:20
And the nice thing about Senturus is that our team is both large enough to handle your most complex and robust business analytics needs, yet we’re small enough to provide very personalized attention.
36:33
We invite you to visit our website for hundreds of free resources, literally, from past webinars on all things BI, to be fabulous up to the minute easily consumable blogs.
36:45
Speaking of great upcoming resources on the next slide, you’ll see we’re doing a Snowflake webinar, seven: Tips for Cost Effective Performance that that’ll be at our usual webinar day and time, those are on Thursdays.
36:56
11 PM to 12 PM, Pacific; 2 to 3 Eastern.
37:03
You can register on senturus.com/events for all the upcoming events and see what’s coming up and join us.
37:12
And, as I mentioned before, we discussed as a single class, but we offer a complete spectrum of BI training across Cognos Power BI and Tableau across all these different modalities, and are particularly ideal for organizations that may be running one or more of these platforms. So, again, our instructors are all conversant really in all of these tools.
37:33
So, it helps for companies that are coexisting by adopting bimodal BI, moving from legacy to self-service, or moving from one platform to the other, and we’re able to mix and match our tailored group sessions, mentoring, instructor led online.
37:48
And, of course, e-learning self-paced learning into whatever mix is optimal for your organization.
37:56
And then finally, before we get to the Q and A, I’ve got a lot of great additional resources here.
38:01
On our website, as mentioned, we’ve been committed to sharing our BI expertise for over a decade.
38:08
So with that, hopefully, you guys have put some questions in here.
38:14
And we do have a couple of questions here. Let’s see.
38:18
Is it possible to take a SAS dataset into Power BI?
38:25
I honestly don’t know the answer to that one.
38:28
Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m not sure either. You can use things like Python and whatnot and I know you can do that in Tableau. You will have to get back to you on that one. I’m not 100% sure about that.
38:42
I’m looking through the questions right now, Mike, and it looks like you all want a copy of the PBX or you could just come to the class. And you could build it yourself.
38:53
There you go no better way to learn.
38:57
I’m trying to look that up. I believe that you can do that on the service.
39:01
But, I can see that, though. Can you save selections on…? Yup.
39:07
Specific to an individual user, for future use.
39:13
And, I would have to double check that one, to see where you could do that on the service.
39:17
But, that’s so.
39:19
Is he saying that on the surface?
39:21
Because the arc that you showed there is kind of the ability to set some filters and keep those so you can quickly revert to a particular snapshot. Right?
39:30
Right.
39:30
But that’s if I If I give this to somebody, then it becomes theirs when I see something, the question like this to me, looks like a security type of question, possibly.
39:42
If I have one workbook that’s going out to different users and it would be specific to individual users, I’m not sure how you would do that in a PBI X to give it to somebody other than a bookmark.
39:55
I echo what you’re saying.
39:56
Bookmarks are a way for you to save selections of individual filters or splicers to allow you to jump to a snapshot. If you’re referring to more of a row-level, security type thing, you can certainly apply that.
40:14
But it doesn’t really work. Like the bookmarks do, right. It’s more at the data level or in the model level.
40:20
Exactly. So, yeah, bookmark allows you, for that part of what you’re talking about. But I don’t think that’s exactly what they were getting out with that question.
40:30
Yep, I understand.
40:32
You know, 1 thing 1 thing that’s interesting, Patrick, and maybe you can talk to us a little bit is I find working with clients love their cross tabs. Because, A) they’re really used to them and B) it’s hard to beat the information. Density that’s in a cross tab, right? Yeah. These nested cross tabs have absolutely 5, 6 different dimensions. How do you tackle that when you move?
40:55
Two? Or how do you address that best when you when you move to a visual approach? Well, let’s think about the simple thing here, though.
41:02
If I give somebody more than 500 rows of data, how are they going to find any kind of trend or pattern in that kind of noise, Right?
41:13
And that’s what we have to remember.
41:16
Data, we all love data.
41:19
We love looking at it, but there’s a point where the human brain can’t handle more than that.
41:25
And we see this with, even with Excel users, where they have to filter and they have to group and they have to sort.
41:30
So when we get into that, that’s when we need to be really efficient. With our, with our slice ERS, and are filtering, and are things along those lines where we’re only giving them the stuff that’s important to the business question. Right? We don’t want to give them.
41:46
Scroll after scroll of row after row. And it looks like we did get an answer. There is the thing persistent filters that will handle the filter issue.
41:57
And, it does look like, I’m not sure what you were saying on that other one, though, there K, if that if Sass can, in fact be used or not.
42:07
But I do see that persistent filters looks like the answer on the other one.
42:12
So, there is a way to handle that.
42:15
That’s great.
42:16
We have some other webinars on our site, by the way, about it, The kind of science around good visualizations and dashboard design, some of those are, in fact, even hosted by either myself or or Patrick or some of our visualization experts. And, I agree with you there. It’s really There’s a couple of things around keeping it simple, right? And, and, you start from a summary level and then drill down to more levels of detail. Absolutely. And you can absolutely do that in Power BI, I If I can take a second. Just go back to this real quick.
42:51
You know, one of the things that we have, and I already closed, and so just give me a second If I open this back up.
43:02
And I promise, even though it’s almost Halloween, nothing’ spooky happening here, but even though I think I elevated Adam’s status so, he can answer those questions directly, because I’m not a master.
43:15
That’s perfect. Thank you, Carrie.
43:18
So, I do actually have one on drill thrus.
43:26
No, and this is the perfect situation, right?
43:28
We started a summary, and we drill up and we drill down.
43:33
And so, Mike, even to your comment, there’s a lot of data in this one lot of rows of data, but I don’t put that data on the top level, right?
43:46
I drill into it. I drilled deeper in, I drilled down to the next level.
43:52
So using drill downs is a great way to still be able to give them a lot of data, but allowing them to focus on what they need to look at any given time. Now, some of you may also notice that this one’s using the tool tip.
44:08
Here is a perfect example of what I was saying earlier.
44:11
Make sure that you, if you have a tool tip visualization out there, make sure you’re not having it pop up when you don’t want it to pop up.
44:21
In this case, it’s not relevant to this map.
44:25
But, again, being able to drill down, being able to go down.
44:30
And another nice thing about Power BI is for those people who want to see as a table, look at this option right here, Show as a table.
44:38
So this shows you, like, I was just saying, there’s a lot of data on that one data point, and so I’ve got the ability to do both.
44:47
And I really like that, and it comes back to understanding the business question, what are the questions that the users are trying to answer? That, what’s their next, the action that they hope to take, or the decision they hope to make? So?
45:01
And, you have to sort of balance that between, you know, you’ll get users who, they just what you want to see, the big numbers. You want your nice, clean dashboard. But then you go to the users, and they’re like, well, but I want to filter on this, and I want all the data.
45:12
So, that’s always a challenge. And, kind of, the real-world, is striking a balance between those two things? Absolutely.
45:17
And then we can also have straight up drill through.
45:24
So, here, here’s another example exactly what we’re talking about. This is the one you saw me build today.
45:30
This one I’m using as a parent and drilling through to the detailed child.
45:39
So, multiple ways to handle that scenario in that situation.
45:44
That’s all I got, Mike, unless you’ve got anything else for today.
45:50
Now, I think that said that covered all the questions that we have a quiet audience today. They were here. They were just in awe of your presentation. And thank everybody. Yeah. We we’ve been holding a really good audience view and everybody’s been paying great attention. So thank you all for paying attention, love it, right. You can move to the last slide then, Patrick. So yes. First of all, thank you to our presenter, Patrick Powers, for great content today. And thanks to all of you for joining us wherever you are. And please feel free to reach out to us with any of your business intelligence needs.
46:23
And our website, there, if you still use phones anymore, we’ve got an 800 number down there, you can always e-mail us at [email protected]. And we look forward to seeing you on one of our next Knowledge Series events. Thanks a lot, and have a great rest of your day.
