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Showing posts from July, 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...

Small Multiples in Power BI

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I have been spending the past few months getting more familiar with Power BI.   There is a lot of information available, but it is sometimes hard to find exactly what I am looking for.   As I have been creating reports and visualizations in Power BI, one thing I have been missing is “small multiples”.   For those that are not familiar with the term “small multiples”, it is sometimes called a trellis chart, lattice chart, grid chart or panel chart.   It is a series of similar charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to easily be compared.   The advantage is that it uses multiple views to show different dimensions of the dataset. This is a visualization many other tools have, but until yesterday I have not been able to create them in Power BI.   As I mentioned there is a lot of information available for Power BI, and there are also a lot of custom visualizations available.   I had looked in the Office Store before, and I had searched sm...