@BrianJ everything here is gold 
I will need to check out @Melissa’s stuff! the SQL > PQ > DAX is a great way to put it. PQ is such a powerful tool overall.
And thank you for the compliments on my write up! I’ve been working on my markdown skills a bit. (Which, btw, you can use in the new smart narrative visual apparently.)
@BrianJ It’s a treat to see such types of techniques being used to create a report. I just love the way you did all the mashing of data in PQ. It just makes life really really easy especially in complex scenarios. I will transform the data as you described to get a good understanding of the techniques you used.
Lastly, really appreciate that you took out the time to impart your invaluable knowledge.
@BrianJ you are a magician! We all have so much to learn from you! I am very greatful we have a week before a new challenge starts. It is the minimum amount of time needed to look more in detail and be inspired by the ideas of other participants and learn even more. When I go to your Wrap up section, I feel the need to take out a pen and a paper. The ideas we can take out from here can make chapters. I think that after couple of months of these challenges you can have enough information to write a book!
Unbelievable submission this time round Brian.
So much for everyone in the community to learn from. I can see you have also mentioned others that you’ve learned a lot from as well so really appreciate the collaborative nature of your reports creation and descriptions here.
But for me and I’m sure others there’s a lot to be inspired from your work here as well. There’s on the face of it a one page report but you can tell sitting beneath it all is some incredible work around your data model your query editor work and also the logic built into your DAX formulas. And then to top it off you have visualized it in such unique ways that a consumer is going to be incredibly engaged in reviewing this on a consistent basis.
The timeline visualization! Seriously this is epic. So wish I could even have dreamt of creating this and figured out how to implement it as well as you have done that here. That is such a good idea and such a unique way to visualize this random data that we had during this challenge.
Please do a follow up video on this timeline visual for the Enterprise DNA TV channel. The whole world deserves to understand how you did this.
Also really like the dynamic text in the top left hand side of the report page. This is straight out of Greg’s playbook, which I love and I think that it’s something that I’m definitely going to try and implement on a future challenge. Maybe I’ll test out the smart narrative feature to see if it is or works as well as the way that you have done things in your report.
Colors all work really well, and I also really like the consultancy name that you’ve used for your report, Strategic Route. Very creative.
Tooltips are also used really effective especially in your total days elapsed visualization and in the timeline visual. Wow, so good.
Definitely some of your best work I’ve seen I feel. Maybe you think the same. Appreciate the extensive writeup as usual. I’ve learned a lot from reading through it.
Appreciate the amazing work this challenge.
Sam
Thanks so much for the encouraging and inspiring feedback. I’m still amazed at the detailed, individual reviews you provide to every participant on every challenge, and I always experience a thrill when I see your response to my entry pop-up as a new post.
To hear that you and others learn from my submissions still seems surreal to me, since I still so vividly recall being the confused noob who used to stick CALCULATE() statements around every arithmetic operation because… well, I wanted them to do a calculation.
Per your request, I will definitely do a video about the timeline visual over the next few days. It’s inexplicable to me that a visual this good is almost totally undocumented. I nearly gave up on it twice trying to get it to work properly, so will share what I learned with the community and hopefully give back something cool for others to borrow in the future.
Thanks again.
– Brian
Awesome report. It would be great to be able to download the model and go through the techniques, dax structures used.
Thanks very much. I anticipate the @EnterpriseDNA team will have all the files for Challenge #7 posted in the section below soon.
Hi @BrianJ
I clicked on the link to download the PBIX file and have a ganders but i
receive the following error. Any ideas why this would be?
Thanks
Thanks Brian - Strange only i get that message…
Your best best is to download his PBIX file from the link that Sam mentioned right before your post. @BrianJ spent numerous hours putting this together.
Thanks
Jarrett
@JarrettM thanks for your reply. But I think it will be valuable for us members to see how the process was done from beginning to end so we can understand Brian J thinking process around it. I saw a speed video on the showcase example in the membership portal for the other challenges but it is too fast to follow. I can see the pbix file but I think it will be even more awesome if a video accompany this file then we can really see the details and thinking behind the build up and finishing.
There is not one single video that walks through this entire entry end-to-end, but there are a number of resources I and others have put together that will explain how to replicate the nonstandard elements of this entry.
The Data Model
I took a unique approach to modeling the data for this challenge, partially because it was a technique I’d used in a work project that provided a lot of analytical power and flexibility, and partially because it was the necessary structure needed to implement the timeline visual. I have a step-by-step writeup of my data modeling approach here:
Power BI Challenge 7 - Purchases, Inventory And Sales Entry from Brian J - #2 by BrianJ
The Timeline Visual and Custom Icons as Dynamic Indicators
The timeline visual is kind of crazy, since it uses a really cool custom visual for which almost no documentation exists. To explain how to implement that visual, I created the video below. Another aspect of this entry is using custom icons as dynamic indicators (upper right portion of the report). While I don’t have a specific video addressing that, the process that I used to manipulate custom icons for the timeline visual is very similar to what I did for the indicators portion, and is discussed in the video below as well.
Also, re: the custom icons as indicators technique, you can refer to my writeup Challenge #5, where I discuss how that approach came out of an original failed attempt to incorporate the icons directly into the local file:
The Info Pop-Up for the Timeline Visual
This was a blatant steal of a technique I first saw used by @MudassirAli @sam.mckay did an excellent video dedicated to explaining this technique after Mudassir’s use of it in Data Challenge #4:
The Dynamic Text Narrative
This was another steal, this time from @Greg. Again, @sam.mckay did an excellent video on this approach. @Greg does absolutely epic writeups of his challenge entries, and has covered this one as well in a couple of his writeups. Here’s the link to Sam’s video on this technique
I think that should pretty much cover it. The rest of the techniques used in the report are fairly plain vanilla Power BI.
I hope this is helpful, and if after going through the resources above you still have any questions, just give me a shout. Thanks for your interest in this entry - I really had a lot of fun putting it together, so I hope you enjoy deconstructing and rebuilding it.
@ambepat,
I agree with you 100%, no argument here. Think it it wishful thinking to get all of this great material in a video. @BrianJ is great at giving a detailed response in his write ups. Best of luck!
Thanks
Jarrett
Definitely we want to showcase this more in the future and we’re working to get some collaboration going with experts around there Challenge submissions
Hi @sam.mckay that will be great. Like you did yourself for HR and delivery app challenge. That was really good as we could see in real time your thought process and how you go about it.
Thanks Brian for the write up. I am going to try to get involved in the current challenge as like you said the best way to get better is to actually do it daily.
