Dynamics Power Dubai 2019 - D365 Bootcamp

At the end of the course, participants will have a good understanding, and some practical experience, of the modern techniques for transforming, analysing and visualising data producing reports and dashboards, and distributing these to an audience.

Learning Goals

The course covers the following topics. It uses an example-based approach, building dashboards of increasing complexity and sophistication.

Goal One: Get Data

Data comes from a large variety of sources. We look at techniques to extract data from these sources with examples using both Power BI Desktop and R. 

This will cover extracting data from the following sources including:

* Excel spreadsheet,

* CSV files,

* relational databases and

* web pages

Goal Two: Prepare and Clean Data

Our data rarely starts life in and tidy shape. We need to prepare the data so it is ready for analysis and visualisation. We look at techniques such as:

* clean and tidy data: pivot and unpivot, filter datasets, handle missing values, group and sort data;

* transform data: filter, sort, calculate new results to enrich the value of the data;

* merge and append datasets and

* (for text documents), split the text into sentences and words, remove punctuation and non-useful stop-words.

Goal Three: Visualise data – create reports and dashboards

Once our data is clean and ready for visualisation, we can create interactive reports. This section covers:

* the basic chart types: line-chart, bar and column charts, scatter plots, and when it is appropriate to use which;

* more advanced charts: for example, box-and-whisker, tree-maps, waterfall charts, slope charts;

* improve these charts and making them appealing and attractive; titles, axes, fonts and good use of colour,

* configure several charts to interact well on a single report page to help guided analysis (e.g. drill from summary to detail) and

* techniques of storytelling with data and reports.

Goal Four: Analyse Data

This covers several analytic techniques:

* group data

* apply basic summary statistics;

* add analytical results to charts; for example, reference, average and trend lines.

Goal Five: Publish and share our insights

Once we have prepared our data and built our reports, we want to share these with colleagues. This covers:

* publish our data and reports to the web (in our exercises we’ll use the Power BI Cloud service);

* build dashboards for “at a glance” summary of key results;

* ask questions of the data using natural language;

* allow colleagues to access these reports and apply appropriate security;

* keep our reports up to date by refreshing data on a scheduled basis and

* monitor usage of our dashboards. Which dashboards are popular? Who is looking at what?