Rishi Sapra
Data Platform MVP | Data & Analytics Consultant, Speaker, Trainer and Technology evangelist specialising in Data Visualisation (Power BI) and Microsoft Fabric
Rishi has a unique blend of technical and commercial skills - he is a 4x Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a Chartered Accountant, a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and an Executive MBA (Hons) holder with a first class degree from the London School of Economics.
He currently works as a Data & AI Strategic Project lead at Avanade - a Joint Venture between Accenture and Microsoft which been awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year 18 times! In this role he focuses on Microsoft Fabric Go To Market (GTM) offerings including those around Security & Governance, Industry/Functional accelerators and Azure/BI migration.
Prior to joining Altius in 2017 (Which was acquired by Avanade in 2020), he spent 12 years in the Big 4 /Financial Services (Deloitte, HSBC, Barclays, KPMG) and has a strong background in Business modelling and process improvement.
He is actively involved in the Fabric Community in London/globally and has presented at Meetup groups and several large-scale conferences. His passion is in helping organisations achieve the holy grail of Self-Service BI and helping individuals learn the necessary skills to succeed.
He also runs two core communities - LDI (www.learndatainsights.com) for people to take data analytics quizzes and courses and PPF (www.powerplatformfinance.com) for helping finance professionals apply the Power Platform technology stack in their roles.
Building a credit rating model in Power BI
This session will go through the process of taking a Excel credit rating model for local Government authorities in the UK and look at how it is built as an interactive report in Power BI. We will look at how to replicate complex rating logic in DAX and use slicers, bookmarks and contextual visualisations in order to compare local authorities and understand what is driving the ratings. This will be particularly useful if you have existing financial/operational models built in Excel that are you are considering bringing into Power BI.
Tips and Tricks for working with Finance data in Power BI
Excel has always been the tool of choice for the finance team with the flexibility it provides for logic, formatting and presentation of numbers. But this flexibility has also caused Governance nightmares, performance issues and huge risks with manual processes. Is it possible to also achieve the desired outcomes and flexibility with Power BI whilst also having all the benefits of working in a more controlled, automated and feature-rich environment? Yes! In this session Rishi will show how you can have your finance cake and eat it, showing how to build dynamically formatted financial statements , waterfall charts and KPIs in Power BI to tell an engaging story with finance data. This will be based on the data and reports shown in the blog series at https://aka.ms/pbiincomestatement and the role play session at https://tinyurl.com/PPFroleplay
The Incidental Business Analyst (BA) – Designing a Finance Power BI Data Model to Tell a Story
There is a lot of focus on all the technical aspects of Power BI – including DAX and data modelling – but what about the starting point when it comes to building a report? How do you identify user stories, define the scope of a reporting solution and plan/design your data model so that it will support your reporting requirements (without the need for overly-complex DAX)? Join this session to learn the key steps in designing a data model: Know Your Audience (KYA), Complete a Scoping Template, Define the data granularity/scope and design a conceptual model. We will use time-tested methodologies based on Kimball Data modelling techniques, including a Bus Matrix and Starnet, complete with templates available for you to freely download.
The examples used in this session will be based on finance datasets, complete with a Trial Balance, Chart of Accounts and Journal entries. It will therefore be of particular interest to those who work in the finance sector or are interested in working with finance data, though the concepts shown will be applicable to any sector or industry.
Aggregations and What-if Scenario Modelling in Power BI
Power BI isn’t just a read-only historical view of your data - you can also enter parameters which feed into your model and drive outputs under different scenarios. In this session Rishi will show this process using a simple Power Apps form embedded into Power BI, supported by a basic workflow. This solution is made even more seamless by combining a Direct Query connection to the parameter table with an imported data model on the full dataset, utilising the new Composite Model feature of Power BI. Also learn how to utilise this feature to build aggregate tables – fast in-memory tables for viewing data grouped by one or more dimensions with an automatic switch to Direct Query when drilling down into transaction-level views. The sheer breadth of uses cases to which this can apply, and the performance/power it can bring to your reports is guaranteed to take your breath away!
Quiz Analytics with Power BI and Azure
Rishi has built LDI (www.learndatainsights.com) - a learning platform for people to assess their data analytics knowledge and prepare for Microsoft exams. Within a year there were over 7,000 people signed up and over 60,000 quiz attempts. The data from all of these is processed through Azure and brought into an embedded personalised report for quiz takers, with cohort/benchmark analysis, that also shows the level of Power BI skills globally - right down to granular topics and individual questions!
In this session Rishi will run through not just the insights that can be garnered from the report (covered in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh5jHKoaV74) but also an under the hood look at how the data was captured, and the analysis was put together!
Scenario Modelling in Power BI
Power BI isn’t just a read-only historical view of your data - you can also enter parameters which feed into your model and drive outputs under different scenarios. In this session Rishi will show this process using a simple Power Apps form embedded into Power BI, supported by a basic workflow. This solution is made even more seamless by combining a Direct Query connection to the parameter table with an imported data model on the full dataset, utilising the Composite Model feature of Power BI
Aggregations in Power BI
Learn how to utilise the Aggregations feature in Power BI – fast in-memory tables for viewing data grouped by one or more dimensions, with an automatic switch to Direct Query when drilling down into transaction-level views. The sheer breadth of uses cases to which this can apply, and the performance/power it can bring to your reports is guaranteed to take your breath away!
Storytelling With Data
Based on his article The Art of Storytelling: TED Talks vs Data Visualisation (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/art-storytelling-ted-talks-vs-data-visualisation-sapra-aca-mcsa/), Rishi will walk through the core structure of a gripping story showing how this translates into Power BI using e.g. pre-attentive attributes, presenting data as arguments (Rather than just statements) and providing a ‘so what’ conclusion to the story. He will use real examples from the Power BI data stories gallery to highlight what we can learn about applying these techniques from some of the best data visualisation professionals in the world
Internal & External Sharing in Power BI
Take a comprehensive look at all the options for sharing content with both an internal and external audience, covering everything from Apps to shared datasets to Power BI embedded
Three modes of dataflows
A comprehensive look at Dataflows - how/why you might want to use them and how you can connect them to Azure to move from self-service to Enterprise tooling.
Tips and Tricks for working with Finance Data
Excel has always been the tool of choice for the finance team with the flexibility it provides for logic, formatting and presentation of numbers. But this flexibility has also caused Governance nightmares, performance issues and huge risks with manual processes. Is it possible to also achieve the desired outcomes and flexibility with Power BI whilst also having all the benefits of working in a more controlled, automated and feature-rich environment? Yes!
In this session Rishi will show how you can have your finance cake and eat it, showing how to build dynamically formatted financial statements , waterfall charts and KPIs in Power BI to tell an engaging story with finance data
SQLBits 2024 - General Sessions Sessionize Event
#DataWeekender v4.2 Sessionize Event
South Coast Summit 2021 Sessionize Event
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