Where to Get Free Practice Datasets

Written By Fernan Espejo

Hello Power BI fans, another week, another newsletter! Hope you’re enjoying your week so far, as for me I’ve been busy with a few things like updating our shop, but also some personal development. I’ve been taking a communications skills learning path via LinkedIn and one of the I learnt more about how to build trust, and one of the ways you can build it is by sharing something personal, to humanise you and find common ground with the people you’re speaking to. So I hope that through these newsletters you can get a glimpse of my personal side.

⚡Report of the Week

Check out this Financial Report that Lauren Wessels created for Rabobank. I’m just love a clean-design and his report captured that, here’re a few things to note:

  • Great use of Power BI Service App to manage multiple reports and “group” pages into logical buckets

  • Using multi-row cards instead of individual visuals makes the page super efficient (less visuals, faster load times

  • Overall cleanliness of the page design, showing enough insights and effective use of white spaces

This is a great report to use for design inspiration if you’re looking for one!

🤝 Community Updates

Free datasets to practice and build your own portfolio - This list was created by Bemnet Girma and as someone who works on reports a lot, I know how difficult it is to start building especially if you don’t already have some data to work with. If you want to practice your dashboard-building skills, definitely check his original post to get the 10 datasets (I will list out the top 3 here to keep it short);

  • Amazon Product Reviews - Over 70K online reviews of 50 products, good for analysing sentiment over products

  • Real / Fake Job Postings - Over 18K job descriptions, about 800 fake. This dataset is good to create models which identify / flag fraudulent job descriptions.

  • Supermarket Sales - Historical record of sales, good alternative to Northwind Traders if you’re sick of that old chestnut!

Dynamic default value for slicers - Making your slicers default to today is not currently possible and typically we use techniques like using “today” to always default our reports. According to Miguel Myers, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, we will soon be able to use DAX measures to dynamically define what value is selected with for a slicer! Exciting times ahead!

How AI Redefines Analytics in the Real World (MEETUP, 21st Feb) - Found this meetup by Agile Analytics which is a pretty well-known (at least by me) Sydney-based company and they’re hosting this event looking at different real life cases of AI with Power BI. Being exposed to more and more AI programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney, this is definitely something I’m looking to attend!

🎥 New Videos from Us

  • Anonymising filter results - This was an interesting approach which was inspired by someone who reached out to me. What if you wanted to give your users the ability to drill down while ensuring that results are kept anonymous? Check out the video and see how the solution works!

  • How to use Midjourney, an AI program to generate dashboards - Ever since coming across ChatGPT I’ve been curious about what other softwares are out there that have real use cases with Power BI and sure enough, I found Midjourney which with a few simple keywords, can generate original arts and images for you! I asked it to design me a dashboard, check out the video to see if its any good!

🛒 Updated Shop

Over the weekend I’ve been working on a new template to sell on our digital shop. It’s now live and with it also comes with an updated view of the shop! Here’s the update:

  • Updated shop listings with new graphics, and layout

  • Included a “Live Demo” button that allows you to preview the report live

  • Improved visibility of the shop by adding links to it from the front page

As part of this re-launch I’ve also put all items at a discounted price so if you’d like to show your support or need something to quickly get your started, please check out our digital shop here.

💚 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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