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Showing posts from May, 2017

Business Analytics and Visualization

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It has been a while since I posted a blog article.  Things have been busy and unfortunately my blog has suffered.  Not only have I been busy working in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform arena, but I have also been teaching at a local university.  This past semester I taught Business Analytics and Visualization.  It was a fun course to teach and I was able to introduce business students to the power of analytics using both Power BI and Tableau.  The text for the course was Introduction to Business Analytics, 1 st Edition by Vernon Richardson & Marci Watson.  The text did a great job of covering the types of analytics and the mindset and approach you should follow as a business analyst.  I recently used some of this material in a presentation at an FPnA conference, and it was well received, so I thought I would put the thoughts together here for everyone to read. In today's data-driven world, the ability to transform raw data into meanin...
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Column from Examples - Power BI

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In the April 2017 release of Power BI, Microsoft introduced a great new function.  Have you every been working with your data, and you know exactly what you want a calculated column to look like, but your are not exactly sure of the syntax for the formula?  Maybe you want to concatenate a couple columns, or you want to trim a column or even add some text to a column, well Column by Examples makes this very easy to do. You can access this function in the Query Editor on the Add Column tab. In my sample data there are three columns (birthCountry, birthState and birthCity).  I would like to simply have a new column for Birth Place.  In order to do this, I could add a custom column and write the M formula to define this column.  However I am not sure what the exact syntax should be, so I can simply choose Column From Examples - From All Columns. This creates a new column in the preview mode.  I can then simply type the result I am looking for in th...
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