Azure Maps Visual UPDATE

Who doesn’t want updates to technology? ~~This guy.~~ I mean, I love them- they are great – I work for a tech company! Haha. But honestly, sometimes updates can induce a feeling of dread as often an “update” is just a euphemism for “something new to learn.” And don’t these updates seem to come out JUST when you finally feel comfortable with the *last* version that came out?

That’s what happened a month ago with the July Power BI Desktop update. The Power BI team put out a fantastic new visual Azure Maps visual. I was excited to start using it but then realized very soon that my data set would not work. Why? I didn’t have the latitude and longitude coordinates for my geography table. This was an easy fix though because I know I could do a merging of queries as long as I could find a good data source of latitude and longitude.

If you are looking for a free resource that has a numerous amount of US latitude and longitude information check out https://simplemaps.com/data/us-cities. Don’t worry I’m not getting sponsored by the website. It’s just the best one I could find for free to help my reports.

This week’s video https://youtu.be/SPLotV45M-k will walk you through connecting to several data sources, some data cleansing, merging sources together, and looking at the new Azure Map visual. I hope you enjoy it.

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...

Relating "Related Tables" to Baseball because I Miss Sports

I miss sports. In particular, I miss baseball. Between learning more Power BI functions and the ins-and-outs of DAX, I've turned to Netflix to fill the deep caverns left in my soul since baseball season has been postponed. And as a result, I've thought more about tigers and big cats more than I ever have in my life. I know ALL about Carol Baskins and am fully on board for a spin-off centering on locating her lost husband. I've googled "is it really legal to own a tiger in a residential area?" Without baseball in April, I am barely hanging in there (kinda like Joe Exotic's eyebrow ring). So, I am filling the sports-sized hole by using baseball stats in Power BI to demonstrate pulling data from multiple tables and consolidating it into one table. Some of the data we want to consolidate also has to have some aggregations (which is fancy for "calculations") performed on it. In this demo I will attempt to break down what is really going on ...

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 ...

The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

Search This Blog