How sickness killed my productivity

Written By Fernan Espejo

Hello Power BI fans, hope you’re having a great week so far! I’m just recovering from an illness that has taken the whole week away from me it seems like. I’m not the type of guy who usually gets sick (thank you Philippines for tempering my immune system) but when I do get sick, it lasts for a while. Endless coughing, fever, lethargy while I’m grateful it’s nothing serious, my whole week of productivity has gone with the wind.

Since I started YouTube, I learned the importance of planning ahead. You probably didn’t even notice since the upload schedule never stopped and that’s because I always create a batch of videos ahead of time to prepare for events like this (or other events like holidays). Now that I’m on the road to recovery, I’m starting to pick up where I left off so expect more things from me very soon!

⚡Report of the Week

Have you seen this report built by Ashish Babaria which is a submission he made for the FP20 Analytics Challenge. The colours are pretty muted but it uses a lot of pretty cool techniques to make this report looks seemingly not like a Power BI report! Here are some of the features that I really liked

  • I love the use of field parameters to dynamically change what’s being analysed in the performance matrix, it instantly gives you so many ways to look at how the sales are distributed.

  • Overall design of the page should be noted as well. He’s definitely made use of backgrounds for the static elements which would normally be impossible to do with just the Power BI shapes. I LOVE the fact that the slicers are “contained” within their box, which makes it seem app-like, at least for me anyway

  • The data storytelling seems to be pretty well-thought out too in my opinion. It doesn’t just give you your typical Total order, Total Cost which doesn’t make sense by itself by the way, there’s always comparisons. “Are we selling more on weekdays or weekends” “How much profit are we making against our total sales”. “Which products are popular in which region” These are the type of questions a business owner will typically ask and I’m glad to see this present here

🤝 Community Updates

Share Individual Visuals into PowerPoint - This post was made by Daniil Maslyuk and this is a new feature that somehow wasn’t part of the feature update. It’s a good feature to take advantage of to static screenshots in your slides.

P.S. Follow Daniil on LinkedIn as he seems to always have the latest news about Power BI features before Microsoft officially announces them!

How to integrate ChatGPT with Power BI - ChatGPT, along with other AI-powered software have been the centre of attention the past few months, and I already covered how it can help you write DAX codes. There is an interesting custom visual to come out soon which allows you to ask natural-language questions, similar to the Q&A feature! Looking forward on testing this out when it comes.

Different ways of working with Excel and Power BI - GuyInACube released a new video talking about the many ways you can work with Excel files and Power BI. This is a hot topic especially because I see a lot of potential with converting Excel files into datasets so it can be re-used across the organisation. Check the video out!

🎥 New Videos from Us

An intro to snapshots - Reporting historical data without snapshots can be misleading, and with dynamic elements in Power BI, you won’t even know that it’s an issue. In this video I demonstrate what kind of problem snapshotting solves.

Where to get free datasets for Power BI - It can sometimes be difficult to get started with building reports if you don’t have any data to work with, so in this video I list out some of the sites you can download datasets to play around with.

💚 Enjoying these Weekly Newsletters?

Feel free to check out some of my other stuff, continue your learning or support however you can, thank you!

Finally and again, I want to thank you for supporting us and engaging what we do (or I do) here at Solutions Abroad. Have a great week ahead and see you again on the next one! ✌

Fernan Espejo
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