This week was all about learning and becoming familiar with PowerBI. After a few ominous warnings from previous cohorts and subtle hints shared by our coach, I was curious to discovering more about PowerBI and the differences compared to creating visualisations with Tableau.
We began learning about Power Query, and it's own special language "M". It really did feel like back to basics, but different. Combining datasources, aggregating data, pivoting, removing rows and columns and so on, it felt familiar. After learning about data models, creating them in PowerBI and learning the advantages, such as the automatic relationship creation, was interesting to learn about.
The next few days dove deeper into specifics around customising graphs in order to better communicate insights with chart and chart types. Learning about "DAX", the other coding langauge within PowerBI proved useful with understanding measures, columns and tables. Combining this with understanding filtering techniques and creating interactivity with the dashboard. We got challenged to our our first few Workout Wednesday's in PowerBI, which is shown below.
The learning culminated in learning the technicalities behind Calculated Columns and Measures, and DAX foundations of Mathematical functions and Common Text functions, Date and Time functions, and Logical Syntax.
The Client Project for this week tasked us with creating a final sketch for the client, as well as a dashboard implementing the alterations made from the previous consultant to answer the user stories. I was tasked with creating a dashboard for Financial Complaints data in PowerBI. Whilst I felt content with what I'd managed in the limited time available, I did learn a lesson on double checking the work once it was published to the web, not only before upload, as none of the drill down functions on either dashboard worked. As it turned out, half was due to an oversized outline of a shape blocking the filters (not visually, but once I attempted to click), and the other not realising that the current drill down you have selected when uploading is the state the file will default to. As always in the Data School, another point to improve on.
Next week will be a full Tableau Desktop week, as well as the final Friday Internal Client Projects before beginning the long schedule of week long projects.