The Visualisation Process: Power BI and Data Analytics for Enviro’s (Feb 2021)
🎦 Check out the full event recording here 🎦
The "Power BI and Data Analytics for Enviros" meetup group is all about sharing tips, tricks and hacks for analysing, visualising and communicating environmental data. The purpose of this blog is to summarise the key take-aways from each of the presenters, to help with sharing knowledge, empowering others and creating a strong data culture within our community.
In the Feb session, we had Michael Berry (Accenture, Melbourne) taking the group through the thought process and choices he made when putting together his visualisations for #MakeoverMonday 'What's warming the globe' - refer to Michael’s LinkedIn article here: https://bit.ly/37kgOez. We also had an open Q&A session talking about Power BI, data analytics and DataViz, with special guest Ben Ferry from Berlin, Germany. Ben is @PowerBIGuy on Twitter and has also recently started up his own YouTube Channel and his own blog - so follow and subscribe to keep learning from him!
You can watch the entire recording in the video above, or skip ahead to the sections that interest you by clicking on the individual videos below. The blog is connected to our Meetup group and YouTube channel recording, so we would LOVE to have you subscribe to these and become part of our growing community 😊.
Group Intro & A Fun Quiz…
Christian & Alice (DiscoverEI)
▶️ We introduced the group and ran a fun little quiz for a great prize: the RADACAD academy one-month subscription ▶️
Reza Rad and Leila Etaati from RADACAD generously provided a one-month subscription to the RADACAD academy online learning library, which is a fantastic resource to learn about Power BI, custom visual development, SQL and so much more. Congratulations to Douglas De Brito from Waikato Regional council in NZ, for winning this months’ prize.
DiscoverEI’s own Daniel Marsh-Patrick also has an excellent course on the RADACAD Academy all about “How to Build Custom Visuals” which we highly recommend for anyone interested! The RADACAD team are also running the Power BI Summit online conference in April 2021, so make sure to register to hear from some of the best global speakers talk about Power BI.
The visualisation process (Global warming and Radiative Forcing)
Michael Berry (Accenture - Melbourne, Australia)
▶️ Skip ahead to Michael’s session ▶️
As part of his recent #MakeoverMonday challenge, Michael developed a report which was inspired by the Bloomberg visualisation from 2015. The key business question as part of Michael’s quest to unpack this visual was: What are the individual forcings leading to global warming?
In developing this report, he drew on some of the Fundamentals of Data Visualisation and was able to determine that it really is greenhouse gases having the greatest impact on radiative forcing. Thanks for the awesome presentation mate and don’t forget to follow the #MakeoverMonday tag!!
You can view the slides for Michael’s presentation and also interact with his Power BI report HERE!!
Your DataViz Q&A
Ben Ferry (@PowerBIGuy - Berlin, Germany)
For the first time in our meetup series we had an open Q&A to answer your DataViz questions - Ben Ferry (@PowerBIGuy) and Michael Berry, and Alice and Christian from the DiscoverEI team were on-hand, along with HEAPS of Power BI experts on the call. We also learnt about how @PowerBIGuy got his nickname and the awesome story about how he changed careers and quickly fell in love with Power BI, like so many people from our community. Some of our biggest tips and pointers from the Q&A included:
💡 The visualisation process is iterative - don’t expect the design to come from the first try.
🧍 Know your audience - our users have ~10-15 seconds when they glance at a report to understand the information at a high-level
💬 Define the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process when developing, and ringfence feedback to ensure you are creating within set boundaries.
We also had a question about the advantages of using Power BI vs. Power Query with responses including: you have a greater range of visualisations available; you save a lot on space and size of the data due to Power BI’s compression; and you can leverage dimensional modelling.
Ben also shared with us his trick for building a matrix with even column width - take a look if this is a feature you need some help with!
Our next session will be coming in March 2021, and will be focused around energy data visualisation, including a brand new custom visual!! More information on the session will be available on the Meetup page soon.
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