Is visual storytelling with data the new reporting, a Power BI story (Part 2)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Can this be done in Power BI? We see so many great examples of visual storytelling in digital news articles, for example this one from ABC News – How life has changed for people your age – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), where stories and data merge and come to life. Is […]
Read MoreIs visual storytelling with data the new reporting, a Power BI story (Part 1)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Can Power BI bake visual data stories into the day-to-day reporting landscape? Dashboards, the data visualisation kind, have now been around for a long time and is the go to solution that execs and managers rely on for a quick snapshot of how things are tracking in their organisation, department, team, or […]
Read More
Our Favourite Sessions from the Power BI Summit 2022
The Power BI Summit is a multi-day conference, the largest of its kind, run virtually across 5 days. It brings together the best and brightest including Microsoft’s Power BI team’s product group, community experts and MVPs. With over 100 sessions and presenters, a huge range of topics were covered across technical, analytical, and business perspectives. […]
Read More
Power BI – Paginated RESTful API as a Data Source
Introduction Power BI has an ever-expanding list of supported data connections, Databases, Online Services, Python Scripts, and more. At first glance, it appears that they have pretty much everything covered. There is one notable exception however, and it came to light in a recent engagement; RESTful API connectivity. ‘Not to worry though’ I hear you […]
Read More
Ethics in artificial intelligence (AI)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen In this article I will explore some important concepts including: But before we can decide what is wrong and what is right we need to understand what AI actually is. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Official definitions of AI ranges from “…systems or machines that mimic human intelligence to perform tasks and […]
Read MoreThe Purple Peeps Seven Favourites from Ignite 2021
What a wonderful couple of days at Ignite! It’s fascinating to hear all these exciting announcements and top tips from experts globally. One of the best things about being a Microsoft Partner is the access to the technologies, products and tech community, and all these together, empower us to drive impact so we can accelerate […]
Read More
Defining Analytics
Data Analytics used to be a buzzword. It no longer is. It is now a standard business requirement. Over the past decade we have gone from asking “Does your business need data analytics?”, to “How can data analytics transform your business?” Simply put, analytics has become essential to the growth and development of the modern […]
Read More
Azure Purview, does it fill the data governance blind spot for Microsoft? (Part 2)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Welcome back to Part 2 of this blog on Azure Purview. In this instalment continuing from Part 1, I will go through a detailed review and highlights of Purview. Azure Purview – classifications and sensitivity: When the scan completes all data meeting classification rules will be discoverable, whereas Purview’s sensitivity labelling needs […]
Read MoreAzure Purview, does it fill the data governance blind spot for Microsoft? (Part 1)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Data enablement – can Azure Purview help For several years now, I have been evangelising about the need for data enablement in organisations. In a nutshell, this means getting data to consumers (be it final consumers of reports, or consumers who go on to create data solutions such as data engineers, data […]
Read More
Reasons to avoid gradient backgrounds on Power BI reports
Gradient backgrounds are all the rage in dashboard design. They appear to be floating around everywhere. Looks cool right? Perhaps. I am not a fan, and for some time have found it hard to articulate to others why this is the case. My verbal utterances were never much more than “it makes me go cross-eyed […]
Read More7 Favourite Power BI Summit Sessions from the Purple Peeps
The Power BI Summit was hosted by RADACAD with some 1000+ attendees and 100+ speakers – a mix of the Power BI Product team, Microsoft MVPs and Professionals. The sessions were targeted for beginner to intermediate level users with some more advanced topics available. By far the biggest value came from Q&A sessions, hearing from […]
Read MoreExposé at Ignite 2021 – our main takeaways
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen The Microsoft technology stack, specifically Azure, has over the past few years provided many best-of-breeds solutions to common data problems and tackled the data analytics domain with a different approach to its competitors (AWS and GCP). And recent changes saw them consolidate and tightly couple some of the key data resources which […]
Read More