The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

Okay, okay, not really. Beer is though. But if my wife asks, it's "quality time spent with her watching British dramas on PBS Masterpiece." In all seriousness, if you are new to Power BI - then DAX may seem like a foreign language.  Do you want to find out some quick tips or best practices?  Well, let me give you a few tips that were helpful to me when first starting to write DAX formulas. The TAB key is your best friend.   Don’t try to type everything character for character for your formulas.   Just type until you the formula, column, table, etc. shows up directly under the formula bar.   Once, it is there hit the tab button and it automatically promotes it into your formula bar.  Is the formula text too small for you?   It’s always too small for me when doing demonstrations for others.   Place your cursor in the formula bar.   Hold down the control key on your keyboard and use your mouse scroll wheel to make the text larger or smaller...

If there is anything constant in the world at this time, it is that you will get an update to your Power BI desktop once a month.  If you are running low on time and want a quick video summary of June’s updates, then you are in the right spot. This video covers all the new updates, but one of my favorite features is being able to add the visual data points to a line chart.   Yeah, I know that might not be the most exciting thing, but coming from a math background and teaching my kids how to graph line charts -- I missed the absence of the dots.  I mean really, how else could we make a line chart before computers without the dots? I hope you enjoy it.

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...

If I knew then what I know now is a timeless adage that is most certainly universal. It is one that keeps popping up in my head the more and more I learn about Power BI's capabilities. I can't help but think back to my 15+ years of teaching as my context.  I have two main goals for this week’s blog and demo.   Goal #1 is to show you how I created a report using Power BI with fairly minimal effort. Goal #2 is to walk you through the process of publishing to the service. I wish I knew the basics of Power BI when I was in the teaching profession.   I spent countless hours analyzing my student’s data.   Sure, the district supplied us with some data analysis programs, but those only related to the mandated state and county tests forced upon the students.   I wanted to analyze my students’ performance on my assignments and assessments.   So the long process would begin  downloading the grade book files from our school program into Excel, and then I would...

Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A This was a series of commands, a holy "code" that I whispered to myself over and over again on the walk home from school until it was etched in my 6th-grade brain.  Earlier that day was the first time "the code" was mentioned-- whispered about at the lunch table because my buddy Rick's older brother told him it was "technically a cheat code" and we could all go to jail or worse if we told people we knew.  It was dangerous. It was alluring. And I was eleven walking home to beat Contra for the first time. Twenty-five plus years later and cheat-codes still seem a bit enticing.