All,
Okay, Enterprise DNA Power BI Accelerator Week #1 - here we go!
If you’re just starting out on your Power BI journey, or if you been at it a while but need some additional structured practice to help things “click”, or if you just want to accelerate your progress in general, we think this initiative is for you, and we are excited to get started.
Here’s the brief for this week’s problem:
Your boss comes into your office Monday morning looking stressed. She tells you that we have the opportunity to acquire one of our main competitors, and that the CEO wants a briefing by COB to answer the following questions about the acquisition target:
- What were their highest and lowest sales in a given year?
- In what states were their sales high? Low?
- How many sales did they make of their top 5 products each quarter?
- Who were their top 10 salespeople in a given year, and what was the $ value of their sales?
She then tells you that the CEO has provided a mockup of what he wants the report to look like, and asks “can you do it?”
Initially, it looks a bit involved, but then you realize the whole report is built off of two simple measures, and that you can leverage context in Power BI to do much of the heavy lifting. You look up from the data, and confidently tell her “sure, no problem”.
Now get to work…the company is counting on you.
A few notes:
- Life is an open book test, and Power BI Accelerator is no different. Feel free to use any resources at your disposal (e.g., videos, blog entries, forum posts, etc.)
- In Power BI there are frequently multiple ways to accomplish the same task, and that is true for this problem as well. For at least two of the visuals in the report, there are simple and complex ways to do them. Taking the simple route is fine (that’s what I did…), but if you have the knowledge, time and motivation to undertake the more complex approach, by all means feel free to do so.
- If you run into difficulties that you simply can’t solve on your own, you can post to the forum, and I or one of the other Experts or Power Users will respond as quickly as possible.
- Don’t feel like you have to tinker to get the look of the report perfect. The key is developing a better understanding of the general concepts involved.
- If you want to post your solution in the forum thread for this week’s problem, that’s great but not at all required. There is no competitive aspect to this initiative, other than the competition with yourself to get better.
If you do post, please use the spoiler alert option in the forum to avoid folks still working on the problem from seeing information they would prefer not to.
Later this week, I will post information in this thread about the date, time and registration information for the live solution session next week.
Finally, I would very much like to thank the volunteer advisory team of Kim Cook, Guy Johnson and Eric Malloy, whose excellent feedback really improved this week’s problem, and also EDNA Power User Udit Chatterjee (forum regulars know him as @quantumudit), who is working with me on building out the long-term learning plan for this initiative.
Okay, enough chit chat – let’s dive in and start learning…
Thanks for participating!
• Brian
