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Given the breadth of knowledge on here, would appreciate some guidance / experience please?
We are looking for a relatively quick method to better visualise and allow slicing and dicing of data which is already collated on .xlsx but normally presented in Powerpoint.
Power BI a decent tool and relatively easy to pick up and master?
Thanks.
PowerBI is a great tool but really not that easy to pick up and master although not difficult either. You will just need to put aside a bit of time to learn it, it doesn't work well to peck and guess with it. It's worth the effort if you really want to make your data nice for visualizing and allowing people to drill into the data. It works best if your organisation uses Microsoft 365 so you have a shared workspace where you can publish the data.
PowerBI desktop is free and what you use to connect to your excel file to build your reports. Only one person can open that at a time though
PowerBI online is paid for and is where you publish your reports from the desktop version. Several people can open this at once
I find the Microsoft tutorials ok
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/powerplatform/power-bi?WT.mc_id=powerbi_video-docs-link
I've been a PowerBI and Tableau user in the past. Prefer PowerBI, it's easier to pick up. There are loads of tutorials, (see above and YouTube) to get you started. One of the harder things is making links to complex datasets, but if you only use Excel, that's actually quite easy.
I'm not 100% sure on anything in this next paragraph, maybe someone else can conform or deny. As a free user if you save the visualisation to an MS Teams team folder, then any member of that should be able to use it. You might have to manually refresh the data in that case, auto refresh is a paid for/workspace feature.
Another +1 for PowerBI, but echoing all the comments above about taking the time to learn about it before launching into your first dashboard. And give plenty of thought to your data model - if something seems really difficult in PowerBI or is giving crazy answers it's usually down to the data model not being set up appropriately.
And give plenty of thought to your data model – if something seems really difficult in PowerBI or is giving crazy answers it’s usually down to the data model not being set up appropriately.
It's quite hard to get it wrong if you are using Excel because all the columns naturally suit. And no data connections needed if it's all in a single excel sheet.
It’s quite hard to get it wrong if you are using Excel because all the columns naturally suit. And no data connections needed if it’s all in a single excel sheet.
You'd think that, but then there's always that spreadsheet that every organisation has. You know, the one that Trevor from marketing built 8 years ago which Katie then tinkered with after Trevor left and then Simon modified to include the reorganisation. The one that's littered with errors, broken links to other workbooks that don't exist any more and random rows where the formulae have been replaced by values....
You’d think that, but then there’s always that spreadsheet that every organisation has. You know, the one that Trevor from marketing built 8 years ago which Katie then tinkered with after Trevor left and then Simon modified to include the reorganisation. The one that’s littered with errors, broken links to other workbooks that don’t exist any more and random rows where the formulae have been replaced by values….
which desk is yours? I’ll wander over for a coffee as you must work were I work.
You’d think that, but then there’s always that spreadsheet that every organisation has. You know, the one that Trevor from marketing built 8 years ago which Katie then
You only have one?!
Trevor's spreadsheet is a sack of ?
Spotfire has been my go to for quick vis.
I can see that Power BI will appeal to folks already deep in ‘business’ use.
with other peoples spreadsheets I have found that the organisation of the data can be an obstacle to effective vis. ‘Tidy’ data seems alien to many regular users who seem to have ‘what do I want to do with these data’ as an afterthought
Otherwise R.
Where is your source data coming from ? ie is excel the first time it’s recorded or is there a primary digital source?
Microsoft are starting to push CoPilot. I’ve seen a live demo of it combining excel data to create a report with narrative, dumping it to word or PP
My job is PowerBI/Fabric or whatever they decide to call it this week.
first the tool is basically irrelevant, dashboarding is a skill, so make sure you know what the story you want to tell is.
Next if you want to use PowerBI, it will do anything you want it to do, but the caveat is somethings are easy and somethings far from easy.
Do not trust any of the automated tools when it comes to DAX, you may have something that works but then discover that for a particular combination of events it breaks.
What ever you do this week be prepared to do it a different way next week.
From an admin point of view, there are things you would think are easy that are almost impossible.