Storytelling with data and Power BI

[ruthpozuelo]

You have millions of rows of data stored in your data warehouse, you have it accessible and available for business users and report users, but how do you effectively tell a story using all that data? How do you unlock the secrets and the potential your data has?

Check this blog post to get a summary of the webinar I did with Charles Sterling on the Power BI YouTube channel where you will learn tips & tricks on how to effectively visualize your data, the do’s and don’ts and how to present your data so questions can be asked and get answered in the same report.

You will also find at the end of the post a link to download the presentation shown during the webinar and of course a link to the recording.

The webinar:

How to tell a story with data and Power BI

Data is useful, only if....

Data is useful, only if...

Accessing data has gotten soooo much better now with cloud computing, APIs, open source data initiatives, that the bottleneck has moved from accessing data to understanding it.
So, how do we present and visualize data so we can learn something from it and take action?
In the webinar I give you my top tips to get that done:

Some of my top tips for data visualization.

Can you tell what those tips are in this example? If not, watch the webinar where I go through them in detail:

From theory to practice!

The last 20% matters

The last 20% of the report work matters...

So what does that mean? The last 20% matters?
If you are a Power BI developer, you know that the effort that takes to create reports is gigantic. For those of you that are not involved in all the steps of the creation of the report, here is a summary:

The iceberg of a Power BI report creation

As you can see, you need to first:
1. Find the data
2. Then you need to put it in Power BI and clean it
3. After that, model it and do the DAX calculations and then
you can start working on the remaining 20%:
4. Visualizations, branding and design.

This process can take minutes up to weeks depending on the data and what you are trying to do and more often that not, at least for me, when I get to the last 20% I am exhausted and I just want to get it done.

PRO TIP!! Well, here is where you need to close your computer and do something else for a day or two and then come back and finish the report.

Curbal tips.

Give your reports a polish to make sure they look as good as possible.
Remember, you have spent hours or weeks creating them, so why not let your reports shine and look awesome?
Here is an example of before and after:

Before

Before designing a Power BI report

After the design...

After designing the Power BI report

Which leads me to the next tip:

Pro Tip: If you don't have the designer skills, ask your marketing team or hire a designer to help you out.

Curbal tips.

....and your Power BI reports will start shining in no time 🙂

I hope you enjoyed the story! You can download the presentation in the Download center, at the Community Downloads, download #45.