Please join me and other 2017 PASS Summit speakers for 24 Hours of PASS: Summit Preview on July 19th and 20th. 24HOP is a series of 60 minute on-line sessions presented back-to-back for 24 hours, from the same professionals who will deliver preconference and main conference sessions during the Summit the first week of November this year. These online sessions are free of charge and normally attended by thousands of individuals to gain insight and knowledge about the topics. 24 Hours of PASS features free educational webinars delivered over 24 hours. Topics covered in this edition include Performance Tuning, SQL Server 2017, Linux, DevOps, Azure, PowerShell, SSRS, Power BI and much more. Browse all sessions. These webinars provide a sneak peek at some of the best practices, expert tips and demos you’ll find at this year’s PASS Summit in Seattle. Continue reading
Category Archives: Data Visualization
Power BI Hands-On Workshops in April, 2017
During the month of April, I will be delivering three full-day Power BI hands-On workshops. Each of these events will be the Friday preceding these SQL Saturday events. Seating is limited and many of these workshops tend to book-up. Follow the links to register.
Huntington Beach, Orange County, CA; March 31
SQL Saturday: April 1
The format will be the same for each event. These are intermediate-level workshops. If you’re new to Power BI, just a little self-study should get you ready to optimize your learning experience.
Event Description:
In this Power BI hands-on Workshop, we will quickly review the essentials and learn some advanced techniques to transform, model and analyze business information with Power BI Desktop. Techniques and best practices presented are from several prior workshops and years of field experience. Learn to use self-service and enterprise-scale Power BI capabilities; gain valuable skills to integrate, wrangle, shape and visualize data for analysis.
If you’re just getting started, please pick-up an intro book or use online resources to familiarize yourself with Power BI Desktop so you can take your skills to an intermediate level in the workshop. If you have the basics, be prepared to take your skills to the next level; learn to address data and reporting challenges with advanced design techniques. At the conclusion of the workshop, you will have a complete solution built from real business data, shaped, cleansed & modeled; with a dashboard and interactive report visuals ready for analysis.
Topics & skills include: Power Query/M, modeling and calculations/DAX, standard & custom visuals, R visuals. Data sources: CSV, JSON, SQL Server; query folding, scheduled refresh & DirectQuery.
Attendees should have at least intro-level experience w/Power BI Desktop or Power Pivot. Bring laptop w/latest Power BI Desktop ver. installed (PowerBI.com), 64-bit Windows & 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended), 2 GB free storage. Power BI subscription recommended, not required.
Publish Power BI Reports to SSRS On-premise Preview Now Available
This just in from the Reporting Services product team:
“Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services: January 2017 Technical Preview now available” This feature addition will allow Power BI reports to be published to a local SQL Server Reporting Services server, entirely-on-premises without using the Power BI cloud service.
The January 2017 Technical Preview can be downloaded from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54610
I literally just received this update from Microsoft and plan to download and start working with the preview. I’ll post updates with my experience.
This is not an update for SQL Server 2016 but it is actually the next version of SQL Server which is due out in a few months.
Please check back for updates!
More information on the SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog
Animated Visual: A Day in the Life of Americans
One of the more effective data visualizations I’ve seen in a while, this animated visual is a time-varying Markov chain developed by Nathan Yau of FlowingData. This is a simulation of 1,000 people’s average day. It’s based on 2014 data from the American Time Use Survey, made way more accessible by the ATUS Extract Builder.
Power BI Custom Visuals Contest Round-up
It’s really exciting to see the first round of entries into the Power BI Best Visuals Contest, which has been running for about two weeks and wraps up on October 1. The first people’s choice award winner is Daniele Perilli from Rome who submitted a nice horizontal bullet chart. The contest is a catalyst to get the community developing custom visuals for Power BI using Java Script libraries and an open development environment. What a great way to get the community involved and to fast track onward development of this great product! See the complete list of entries and more contest information here. Check back to this post for contest updates.
October 6th UPDATE
The second and third People’s Choice Awards go to:
“Enlighten” for the Power BI Aquarium
and to fredrikheden for the Breakdown Trees visual. This is by far my favorite because it’s essentially the decomposition tree from ProClarity and PerformancePoint.
The entries:
Bullet Chart
Daniele Perilli, SQL BI
People’s Choice Award
This style of bullet graph is a good choice for visualizing multiple related values on a common axis scale. Stephen Few promotes the use of this as a simple, clean and comprehensive way to present important metrics in a context that reduces clutter and alerts the reader to take action.
Power BI Aquarium
Submitted by Enlighten
This was demonstrated in James Phillips’ keynote at the Cortana Analytics Workshop. This may not be the most scientific approach but it is a fun way to get aggregated metrics to the viewer in a fun and interesting way. The fish, with different sizes and colors, swim around in random patterns. Imagine this dashboard on a large monitor in a reception area, software development floor or desktop support hall; displaying average wait times, bug backlogs or calls handled.
Card With States
Submitted by Daniele Perilli, SQL BI
KPI indicator with status, deviation and history
Submitted by Fredrik Heden
After seeing Datazen demonstrations, people have asked when Datazen and Power BI will share visuals. Now, I guess we know. These visuals were inspired by Datazen KPI tiles.
Calendar Visual
Submitted by Andy Cross
Visualize One Percentage Value with Circles
Submitted by ahoiin
Voronoi Map
Submitted by chriscaruso
Stack/Stream Chart
Submitted by chriscaruso
Infographic; Easy graphical representations
Submitted by Andy Cross
Labeled Histogram
Submitted by dominikcyg
Aster Chart
Posted by the product team as an example entry
Breakdown Trees
by fredrikheden
Fisheye selector for displaying any long list of items
by srinipratapa
Are you Ready to Use Power BI?
What! NO? Get with it, my friend. Power BI is for everyone. All the kids are doing it… not to mention the business owners, marketers, sales campaign planners and scientists, IT Pros and common folk. Power BI is all the rage and can be used to analyze everything under the sun – oh, and that Pluto mission tracking thing that Microsoft did for NASA. Yea, pretty much everybody’s using Power BI!
On the 27th of August, I’ll lead an online virtual workshop “Building Business Intelligence Solutions with Power BI” that will show you how to put Power BI to work. I’ll demonstrate techniques to use with serious business data but we’re also going to have some fun with data from the National UFO Reporting Center. This database contains all of the publically available UFO sighting information, since Thomas Jefferson reported seeing a flying light in the sky up to the latest flying saucer sighting today. You’ll learn to import and mash-up data from different sources, create a data model or analysis and reporting and then create compelling, interactive, highly-visual report and dashboards. You’ll ask you dashboard questions in plain English and she’ll answer you in magically-crafted prose of wisdom and insightful knowledge, investing artistic charts and visualizations while you do nothing but talk to your data. Yep, really.
There’s still time to signup for the training sessions:
Building Business Intelligence Solutions with Power BI
Presented by Paul Turley
Thursday, August 27th @ 11am, 1pm, 3pm EDT
Register for the Complete Course and Save 16%
$237 $199
Session 2: Creating a Data Model and Interactive Visuals with Power BI Desktop – 1pm EDT
Session 3: Publishing the Data Model and Creating a Dashboard Solution – 3pm EDT
Animated Graphics Depict The Fallen of World War II
In an amazing application of visualization techniques, this production is a depiction of the casualties and affects of war. Starting with World War II, Neil Halloran uses animated charts to measure the number of soldier and civilian deaths and then pivots and refactors these numbers in an impressive and impactful presentation that helped me better appreciate what really happened in history. He goes on to perform deeper analysis; comparing these numbers to other wars in history, and to make adjustments for population and other comparison factors. Really well-done.
The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.
This is an 18 minute presentation worth giving your undivided attention to fully appreciate the message. The use of common BI graphics and charting techniques is quite impressive – clustered columns, stacked columns and time-series charts, icons and cloud clusters – with music, narrative & a few pictures, all contribute to a truly enveloping presentation. At one point, you can pause the Flash player and interact with the chart to see more information (if you go to the site choose the Interactive option). View the interactive presentation at: http://www.fallen.io/ww2/
No doubt, this production took a lot of time and energy, and the author provides the option to support his work financially using Amazon; which is a well-deserved donation.
