What better way to start the week than crunching and visualizing data. I joined the Dashboard in a Day workshop by Microsoft and Random Forest, a one day hands-on workshop designed for business analysts.
I have to say that I really enjoy digging into new tools and learning about new technology. Even if I am probably not going to be working directly with PowerBI, it makes my job easier by understanding what is possible and the boundaries of the tool.
Kicking off with a short introduction (and the mandatory Microsoft advertisements), we dove straight into the PowerBI Desktop application itself, learning how to connect to, import and transform data from various sources. After preparing the data, reformatting and splitting fields, we moved on to exploring data with powerful visualization tools.
The exercises were quite comprehensive, and at some point I went rough and chose to implement some of my own visualizations instead.
The event was well organized and planned, the assets were categorized in a way that made it easier to identify the specific assets that suited our needs. The attendee content consisted of Lab Manuals and Datasets that were available for download on MPN without requirement for an MPN ID.
Towards the end of the day the guys from Random Forest ensured that we had a good working knowledge and familiarity with Power BI and possessed the ability to answer questions concerning the workshop or Power BI in general. It was a tremendous learning experience and I couldn’t wait to try out those awesome new technologies! They even spent the last couple of hours of the day to support and guide us through our own datasets. I brought some statistics from one of our Business Units, and it was quite impressive how I could visualize and interactively navigate through the data.
All in all an exciting workshop, and I look forward to playing more with PowerBI in the future. If you have any questions or great ideas, feel free to contact me at bjorn.nostdahl@gunnebo.com 🙂