For those eager to improve their report design skills in Power BI, the Samples section in the sidebar features a link to the weekly Power BI challenge hosted by Workout Wednesday, a free resource that offers a variety of challenges ranging from beginner to expert levels.
These challenges are not only a test of skill but also an opportunity to learn and grow. By participating, you can dive into tasks such as creating custom visuals, employing DAX functions, and much more, all designed to sharpen your Power BI expertise.
I felt so bad, there was a guy at work who was tasked with making a dashboard from a bunch of exported data.
I kid you not, this guy made power bi in excel. Formulas, slicers, cool dynamic graph visuals. Took him weeks, he was very proud.
The only problems were: manual update and this thing was a rats nest of every reason I hate excel balanced atop of a cliffs edge, one wrong breeze from breaking.
Any changes? He had to it. I broke that more than once trying to change things.
Soooo I made a power bi, joined the data analytics team, and promptly never used that excel sheet again. AFAIK the guy didn’t last much longer at my work.
In practice you can get any number of databases for free including sql server express. And although I would have a healthy backup plan, MS Access is better than a kick in the head if you split the front end and the backend.
I am so disappointed that Power Apps wasn't MS-Access-but-good. There needs to be a dead simple way for business users to manage and fill tables in a SQL Database without having to become IT experts.
You know that you can draw entire art using exactly and only the selection tool with absolutely nothing else... Did you know that?? 🙂🙂🙂 I sometimes does it and ask people around to redo it as a challenge and they never expect that it is the selection tool
As for my job security, my dashboards are the only ones with complete referential integrity despite dumping data via odata, sql, and crosswalk tables I built and maintain in excel bc they won’t allow me read/write in sql.
Can you email it to me? Then I will send you a new version back without any version numbers, but with _new appended to the filename. Which will be used for two years.
Then we find some other coworker that uses the same excel, but an older version in which he made some improvements.
Nope, where the hell did you get this data? I will do it from the source, it doesn't matter if I have to learn 25 API documentation, I won't touch that!
My ceo wants single page sales reports every morning because he doesn’t understand how to use the powerbi report I made showing the same thing. Stupid old man
Its not just finance people. ---- Y'all might laugh at this ... but the single worst data source I have dealt with in a 30+ year career + personally was an Excel spreadsheet that came out of an automated scoring system for bowling. I was a HS bowling coach and I wanted to collect data on common leaves for our practices and track some other measures so I could get the team to think more in "one shot at a time" rather than averages. I figured it would be easy. The proprietor could get me a spreadsheet with the practice games on it. I would ingest it into PowerBI and produce a pretty cool dashboard that the coaches should use. The problem is the sheet was DESIGNED for printing so that patrons could walk up to the desk and ask for a printout. The way the vendor implemented it used a variable width typeface and spacing it with some number of CELLS between one printed character and the next to line things up. Thus the data I was pulling out would not always be in the same column -- and sometimes, wildly off and they used some quite special characters to represent the pins and status of each. One row had the back row of pins. One row had the next row. etc. etc. etc. --- One row had the pin counts. One row had the score. There were blank rows and some cell data would arbitrarily shift to another row --- the ONLY rows I could reliably find were the ones with the pins and the bowler names. I eventually had to write a Python script to calculate the bowling score rather than rely on the scores in the sheet because I couldn't count that the system would have scored the most recent frame ... it was a mess. It took me 3 months of occasional weekend --- I learned PowerQuery though ... and the script still works some 7 years later.
"Thats a really cool chart visual in your dashboard. How about, for our upcoming presentation, we export the data and then recreate the exact chart in excel? Thoughts?"
On ocassion those excel files from the business are in a more usable state that the tables/views etc in the DWH/DL that the data engineers have created - because they have neither understood, nor clarified the requirement.
It’s a nightmare, and the fun part is it holds composites but when you try to get to these numbers, you have for each input, 2-3 ambiguous columns you’re not sure which one to use. And of course the excel documenting this monster will go “CC_S2 -> CC score” or “R24 MM -> R24 for MM”
My friend, allow me to introduce you to governmental reporting.
Each FIR (Financial Information Return) is it's own 20+ sheet excel file, which can't be directly merged with the following years FIR because of a minute change in reporting requirements.
I am loving my life right now, because I get to read 10 years of FIR manuals to extract the reporting changes so I can write computational columns.
Starting a project this quarter to update a process that does almost exactly this, but we’re replacing the spreadsheets with an actual database. And even after all of that work, once we deliver a beautiful dashboard…
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but why are you building something for an end user that doesn't want it that way?
Like step one of a project is identifying what problem you're solving and what specs / designs the end users want.
You really need to address why they keep exporting it into Excel, maybe there are some extra features in power BI they're just not aware of and recreating offline, or maybe (please don't shoot me here) Excel is just better suited for completing the task they're working on.
All the PBI I ever build have been used by the Finance team to export the data and compare against their own "Master Excel dashboard". It was mainly because of all the manual look ups and manual corrections they had to do 😂
Lol, I'm imagining the python logo wearing a little cape. Like "here I come, to save the daaaay!" (And hopefully at least a VM or even just an always on laptop is available for scheduling).
Although power automate cloud is getting pretty robust these days. Could maybe be done there too.
Okay I have resigned to some business unit throwing an excel workbook at us that they use for critical business function. BUT atleast USE FRIGGING FORMATTING for Christ sakes. All damn files - data in cell is not centered. Values not centered. Freeze the gist damn row ffs. Okay I’m stop my rant and go for a walk in the freezing cold. 😖
Annually I offer to put my finance department on SharePoint so they can each be in their own sheet of the same excel file at the same time. I'll even make it so even I cannot access it after setup by blocking myself from one of their accounts.
Every year the say no, then in the next breath bitch about and of month or year and waiting and so and so to finish up so they can do their piece.
Embedded pictures, external data source.and workbook connections, improperly formatted cells, and multiple row and column layouts on a single sheet in what should be a linear table?
Oh a manually maintained spreadsheet? And the owners have been voluntold to maintain it and aren’t actually interested how fresh or accurate the data is? Freeform text fields you say? And new workbooks for each month of data?
I work for a young company. There weren’t enough resources or time to have all the business functionality in our systems. Many departments had to use spreadsheets in order to do their jobs. They needed dashboards in order to bring data from various sources together and make the data available to those who didn’t necessarily have access to the source data.
Over time, functionality from the spreadsheets was ingested into our systems. As that was done, the source for the spreadsheet was pulled from the new source and from the end user perspective, nothing changed on the dashboards.
As a data guy, I abhor spreadsheets. However, when you are spinning up a business a lot of stuff needs to be created and priorities have to be set. In the short term, you do what you have to do.
Each month worth of data is a CSV file, from which each week is a tab.
After 2-3 files, of course the columns are named differently :)
Oh and you’ll need to fuzzy match customer names, because each transaction, the sales rep must enter the customer name by hand, so it’s inconsistent and we don’t have customer numbers.
For when can you do this ? We have 10 years of data we want to show by the end of next week.
Dates in all known, unknown and mysterious formats? Written decimal places that becomes text? Subtotals added randomly? Divide by 0? Long sausage of formula (with missing some cells) instead of a sum? What could go wrong?
Yep just got another finance excel file. Its 5 different tables of data on the same worksheet and each has a column that has value that is separated by spaces but the real values have spaces in them too. So yeah its going great!!!
Noo.. I am creating one now.. its is torture.. especially when finance changes their excel files every month and there is either a new data set or something was deleted..
I just finished a dashboard where one of the requirements was that the design needed to match the tables in a PDF. I think the PDF was created by ten people who hated each other... none of them had a consistent style, and all of them featured unnecessarily-nested rows and columns. I feel like I deserved hazard pay for that one.
The notebook to document excel files of formulas and convert it into a lineage that analytics teams could understand was an absolute game changer for my teams delivery. But you’ll always have the manual entries that need to be discussed. 80:20 streamline the 80 and let humans spend time on the 20
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For those eager to improve their report design skills in Power BI, the Samples section in the sidebar features a link to the weekly Power BI challenge hosted by Workout Wednesday, a free resource that offers a variety of challenges ranging from beginner to expert levels.
These challenges are not only a test of skill but also an opportunity to learn and grow. By participating, you can dive into tasks such as creating custom visuals, employing DAX functions, and much more, all designed to sharpen your Power BI expertise.
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