What I learned from joining a Power BI Challenge

Written By Fernan Espejo

Hello Power BI fans, welcome again to this week’s newsletter! I noticed a small spike in the number of people who signed up to these newsletters so welcome all!

Last week I participated in the DataDNA challenge hosted by Pomerol Partners and it took me a good few days to build something I was satisfied with. It’s my first time attempting one of these challenges and I thought I’d give it a shot, because I genuinely think that it can help you learn and hone your skills beyond the basics. Here are some of the things that I learned from participating;

💡 What I learned from participating in a Power BI Challenge

A well-designed report increases engagement - As I spent a lot of time designing and curating the elements within this report, I wondered if it was all worth it. Power BI is built as an end-to-end tool and typically most of your time will be spent on cleaning up the data and creating your calculations. In this case because the dataset is small, I decided to spend more time on the design which looking at the engagement (over 41K impressions after a few days) speaks volumes. Of course it’s still important to ensure your data is clean and structured well, but a well-designed report will engage your users to look at your insights.

Real-life objectives help improve your analytical skills - If you’ve never worked in the data industry before, chances are you’ll have a difficult time practicing because you can’t put yourself in the shoes of a user, or an analyst with a real life objective. Challenges like this helps to put you in that mindset by setting an objective, a dataset, and tools to work with. Also with the additional incentives like Amazon gift vouchers, it helps add stakes on what you’re delivering, like in a real office setting.

Other cross benefits - There are so many reasons to join a challenge if you have the and are able to. Apart from practicing your Power BI skills, you also have a chance to see how your peers approached the same problem, get valuable feedback from the community to make sure you’re on the right track. You’re also helping build your own portfolio which ultimately helps to increase the chances of finding a job. For me personally it’s helped me exercise new tricks which gave me ideas for more content over at my YouTube Channel.

If you have the time, I highly suggest participating in one of these community challenges, they’re usually free and they can help you kickstart your career in data.

⚡ Report of the Week

Have you seen this report that the Power BI team created for the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit? Basically, every year Gartner (the folks who rank BI platforms) invites vendors to participate in one of these “Bake-offs” to show off how their products can solve real-world problems.

This years topic was about analysing factors that increases risks of flooding and identify mitigation strategies that countries can take to reduce the risk of flooding disasters.

Here are some of my key highlights from this report:

  • Great use of the Shape Map visual to visualise geographical locations of the different countries. Personally I’m not a fan of using this visual because of how difficult it is to show volumes on smaller countries, but nonetheless I think its a great visual to show off how pretty Power BI reports can look like.

  • On the opposite end, the waffle chart is a great visual you can use to effectively visualise percentages. It’s not a default visual though so you’ll have to import it from AppSource but I thought the use of this is a great way to show proportions fairly easily.

  • Key influencers which uses AI to understand correlations and patterns in your data is impressive to see, as you can easily see a summary of what factors affect for example, influences the number of flood-related deaths to increase.

📰 News and Updates

Power BI March 2023 Update - Some exciting new features came out this month, my two favourite ones are the; On-Object Interaction which is more intuitive than the format pane. The Subtitle which at a glance looks simple but it creates so many possibilities to visualise your data. Check out my summary here.

FP20 Analytics Data Challenge now live! - The challenge is from 23rd March - 24th April and this months theme is HR Data Analysis. Being someone who works within HR, I feel compelled to participate in this challenge. There is a restriction that you can only use the Inforiver custom visual but I think this challenge is pretty interesting!

Microsoft Copilot - This is Microsoft’s answer to ChatGPT. It’s currently in development but I’m excited because Warren posted a demo of how it can be used to create PowerPoint presentations in seconds. Since this will be integrated in the Office ecosystem, I’m excited how this will add value to Power BI at some point, so watch this space!
Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event - In 4th April, there will be a 1.5h discovery session hosted by Microsoft which goes through the new features, capabilities of Microsoft products and its features like automations, AI and other productivity tools. It’s a free and short event so if you want to open your mind to other possibilities, register to this one!

🎥 New Videos from Us

Data Storytelling - In this video we look at some of the tips I can give to help you design Power BI reports that tell effective stories while making sure the interactive elements stay intact

Dynamic Ranking TopN / BottomN - This is a continuation of the ever-complex dynamic ranking using DAX, where we give the users the ability to do things like change the ranking from top to bottom, adjust how many, and adjust the breakdown categories.

March 2023 Update - Here’s a short and sweet summary of my favourite updates from this month

Evaluation Context Explained - Here I cover one of the core concepts that you should be familiar with if you work with Power BI, as it will help you understand how things like filters or row contexts affect your calculations.

💚 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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