Workouts and Workarounds

on 12 September 0 Comment

Sometimes you want a feature in Power BI that doesn’t seem to exist.  Luckily, Power BI is full of hidden ‘features’ that allow you to do what you seemingly could not do.

Same with workouts.  Convention would have you on your back to do some good old fashioned crunches, straining your neck along the way.  But hey, why not do these standing up?  Sure you can’t lift both legs off the ground at the same time, but you can still get results another way.

With Power BI, the trick seems to be start with the way you can do it, and then switch over to the method you would like to ‘carry over’ the features that are available in one functionality to the other.  An example –

Default:  Advanced Filter – only 2 conditions
Workaround:  Using Basic Filter – select the number of options to equal the number of advanced conditions needed.  Then switch to Advanced filter, et voila!

 

 

There are some other examples that are in the back of my head… will try to post them as they surface back to top of mind.

Light & Dark

on 04 September 0 Comment

The return from summer vacation equals jet lag coming from the opposite side of the hemisphere.  (Managed to get to that place in the photo a few posts back!)

So as I write this in the early hours of the morning, I think of all the great data visualizations out there that have a dark theme.  While they look great and impressive at first glance, I’ve found that dark theme is not practical for everyday business use.  After all, how many times do you see other forms of presentations that convey data in dark mode?

It would be interesting to find out the stats on how well data is conveyed via dark vs light mode, and for which use cases.

My thoughts purely –

DARK
One-off presentation
Printed color material – magazines, posters, brochures
Informational

LIGHT
Day-to-day operational
Printed black/white material – newspapers
Screen based – accessed digitally
Action oriented

 

What works even better is to use a combination of dark & light mode in the same presentation, based on the content, bringing that much-needed contrast and focus in design to help viewers process the information accordingly.

 

Back to jet lag, not being a morning person, it is however a great opportunity to experience the calmness of a beautiful sunrise for a few days.  From darkness to light.

 

 

(Just a little) Patience

on 31 July 0 Comment

Today’s post – Patience.

Hubby and I were discussing what we’ve learned about having kids, is that sometimes, a lot of times, almost all the time, we get derailed from one task as we need to tackle five other tasks thrown in by the offspring whilst attempting the original one.

Same with BI data, reports, and dashboards oh my.

I may have a little more appreciation now for the BI team pushing back on my request for a couple more fields to be integrated into the dataset.  How hard could it be?  (On the other hand, I was waiting for more than a year to even get to this point of response).  Seemingly straightforward requests are almost never that.  One possible reason to go sideways with this request – the field is from a different table not part of the current dataset, which leads to going to the next team to integrate this portion, who will push back because they don’t have this on their roadmap.

So just be patient with your teams.  Sometimes adding or modifying a field leads to a domino effect of unintended and usually unwanted consequences.  And on the flip side, err on the side of caution when agreeing to these changes because you will no doubt encounter these obstacles lobbed at you like kids with grenades.

 

all i need is a little patience

Start with the Conclusion (a meaningful one)

on 24 July 0 Comment

If there’s one thing I keep learning, it’s

Start with the Conclusion -> and let’s qualify that to be a meaningful one

People like to know what’s the deal up front.  No time wasted trying to figure out where this is going.  No, nothing is being given away.  If it’s something that’s of interest, people will stay more tuned in.  Otherwise, let’s not waste anybody’s time. 😐

So now that the audience has been reeled in, build up with supporting information.  Take into account your audience of course –

  • Address impatient people first
    • bullet points
    • meaningful headlines
    • executive summary
  • Then go back and forth between details of what’s happened for the analytics, and the visuals, what’s the future for the creatives
  • Finally, talk to the most patient members of your audience

NOTE:  Don’t water down and make a mix all of the above into a mush soup.  Address the personalities accordingly.

 

A Better Conclusion in Power BI

In Power BI, there is a tendency to have generic chart headlines (guilty) and this is partly due to the nature of the reports having the desired low touch aspect.   A couple of ways this can be improved is through the use of –

  • Measures – create measures for the values that change and insert into the Titles
    • A few tutorials out there in youtube land
    • Take it a step further and add the context with values
      • eg. <Store A> had sales of <+/- %> in <month> due to <top reason>  vs  <Store A> Sales in <month>
  • Conditional formatting – icons quickly identify up, down, above, below, etc…

So, these take more effort, but just like anything else the follow through is what’s important.  You can hit the ball over the net, but how you follow through your swing is what will determine the effectiveness of your shot.

 

Scott’s 5 Vacation House Rules

on 09 July 0 Comment

😎 It’s summer, perfect vacation time!  If you can, a change of scenery does wonders.  Inspiration and learning come from everywhere.  And nothing beats being somewhere else than the office, whether it be at home or the office office.

And if you can’t go somewhere right now, get inspired from tv shows.  I do watch a lot of crap tv, but I can still learn 🙂

What I really like are Scott’s 5 Vacation House Rules – so applicable to BI design!

  1. Do Your Research – understand your users and audience, know the data inside and out, what are the data points that will elicit action?
  2. Plan Your Design – how will your users interact with the report?  will they view it on mobile or their laptop? will it be integrated in a powerpoint? do your users know how to enable the filter panel, use the slicers or drill through? be intentional with the design.
  3. Get Noticed – make sure people know about the report and give it that wow factor!  doesn’t do any good if people can’t find it or aren’t even aware it exists.  promote promote promote!
  4. Get Your Hands Dirty – get your users involved to provide their design input or images they would like as part of the report.
  5. Be Your Guest – put yourself in the user’s shoes and test drive your report.  what questions would they want answered next? is it intuitive for someone of their skill level? does it look good on mobile? does the data flow in the right order?

 

Looking forward to being here soon! ⬇

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