July's PowerBI Updates

As I write today’s blog, I am just a few hours shy of celebrating with friends and family (socially distanced of course) my son’s three-year-old birthday. He officially turns three on Monday and I’m excited to have the day off. Whoa! Too much sharing information? Well, this is my blog so I thought I would share how proud I am to be a dad. It also reminds me of how much Jack teaches me daily. Once I think I have him figured out he flips the script on me and amazes me with a new skill. I never thought I would be able to play with Peppa the Pig for 2 hours straight, but alas, I experienced that this morning!

More importantly, it seemed like ages ago when I was wondering if he would ever sit for more than 5 minutes with one activity. As I am always learning from my son, I also find myself constantly having to learn the new features of Power BI with their monthly updates. And that is what is great about Microsoft's Power BI - - it is never "finished." There is always a feature that is growing and evolving into a more advanced, streamlined version.

This month has a lot of updates including Azure maps, new Q&A features, fresh gradient level legends, and external tools. If you are like me and don’t always have the time to digest the article that comes out from Microsoft about the updates, check out this monthly digest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcGjjSWCXno&t=462s) .

I hope it can save you some time and help you learn what’s new!

Comments

The Power of CALCULATE in Power BI

Last week in my blog and video I discussed how Power BI could have made my life as a teacher much easier. It is not that Power BI can do things that I could not on my own. It is the fact that Power BI could have saved me so much time. This led me to some thoughts and questions. How could I have impacted the students more in the classroom with this extra time? Would teachers who were not analyzing student data due to time constraints now start? How can I make the data tell my students a story that gives them an accurate picture of their progress? That last question is what leads to this week’s blog. Many times the metrics (which is just a fancy word for "numbers") of what we want to show are easy to do by hand with a basic math background. Although easy, it can be very time consuming when dealing with different groups of data: like 6 periods of students instead of 1 period. When we want to do these calculations quickl...

The Teacher Becomes the Student

My wife asked how my first day was going so I sent her this selfie. Only a picture could capture it. First, let me tell you that this won’t be your typical Power BI or tech blog that you usually see. Let me set the scene. It was a year and a half ago when I got lucky enough to be introduced to Brian Knight, the CEO of Pragmatic Works over lunch. He had heard from a mutual friend that I was looking to make a career move after teaching Algebra for the past 15 years. Brian started telling me about the company and all the different facets it encompasses. From training, sales, consulting, and app development. Mind you at this time I had never heard of Microsoft Power BI, SQL Server, Microsoft Azure, or have any experience with coding. He told me an opportunity at his company may present itself in the future where I could transfer over my teaching skills into the training side of the above-mentioned programs. I immediately got to work with their On-Demand Learning system to ...

Power Automate: Send Instant Emails From Canvas Apps

In this blog, I want to dive into Power Automate. When I first started with the Power Platform I dove deep into Power BI which then made way for Power Apps. Soon thereafter I was introduced to Power Automate. I sure wish someone had told me about Power Automate when I was a teacher of middle schoolers. There were so many mundane daily and weekly tasks that I could have easily automated if I just would have been exposed to the program. Power Automate is great for taking those routine or repetitive tasks and making them no longer a part of your daily routine. Sure setting up the Power Automate flow takes more time to get created, but once created you then can devote all that extra time you normally would have devoted to the task and now spend them on more mission-critical issues for your job. In this video, I want to show you how you can send an automated email with just a click of a button. Since I learned Power Automate after lea...

The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

Search This Blog