Why Your Reports Aren't Being Used - And How to Fix It

The problem: we expect everyone to adapt and be able to analyze and explore our visualizations. The reality: you’re forcing end-users to adapt to the viz rather than adapting it to their needs.

Key Meeting Insights:
You need to know your audience when building a dashboard. Think about:
-- What does your audience do? What is their role?
-- Why are they coming to you? What do they need?
-- What drives the decisions they make?
Your visuals should behave like text does: context is key.
-- Is the visual help driving the decision? If it’s just nice to look at- then take it out.
-- Everything in a dashboard should help drive a decision.
-- Where can things go wrong in a dashboard?
-- Too much focus on visuals and not on context.
-- Don’t go too broad with your dashboard, have an audience in mind.
-- Understand that not everyone is analytically minded.
How can you win over dashboard users?
-- Do a discovery phase and interview stakeholders in advance.
--Understand their current state and get an idea of their ideal outcome
-- Know what you need to show in advance- what are the requirements
-- How are they going to use the data?
-- Sandbox and version- test out your dashboards in advance. Show all stakeholders how to use and interact with the dashboard. Get feedback and make edits.

Promoting & Governing Power BI in your Organization - Building a framework to Adopt Power BI

This session is focused on the education of administering , adopting, and promoting the Power BI platform for an Enterprise solution. The overall success for an enterprise using Power BI comes not just the skilled Power BI champions but how Power BI is deployed to an organization and maintained. Join us to learn about adopting a framework for your BI team to govern and manage content in Power BI, utilizing Workspaces for BI Collaboration and organization of Report content, creating a Power BI Admin team who maintains and defines the intent of Workspace environments, establishing naming conventions for content (Dashboards, Reports) for End Users, methods to help support and educate end users to adopt Power BI, and creating an internal BI Support Site.

Build, Mange, Grow: Processes for Power BI

No Process Rules Alone.

No matter if you have a team of one of many BI pros across departments, the importance and urgency a pro should have to establish processes to re-use for building and maintaining Power BI Reports and content is essential.

What does it mean to have processes in place for a Power BI team? Why is it important to establish and align expectations around processes? We will be talking about establishing and maintaining processes around building reports, maintaining, and managing content, and growing user adoption around processes. How do they all work together?

Using the Power BI Scanner API to Manage Your Tenant’s Metadata

If you are not using the Power BI Scanner API in your organization to manage, monitor, and track activity in your tenant, this is a can't miss demo. The new Scanner API allows Power BI Admins to fully catalog and collect nearly all of a dataset's information and schema, including metadata such as workspaces, data sources, expressions, and table information.

Join us as we download and use a complete solution using Power Automate and a Power BI Template file available on GitHub to create your tenant's solution, demoing how to set it up and what the report provides to Power BI Admins.

ABC - Always Be Calculating (Measures)

Learn best practices when creating your data models and reports in Power BI Desktop. From organizing your queries to cleaning your visuals, the little things that make a great report will be reviewed! Also learn some tricks & tips that will make creating Power BI models a better experience for you, the author & your end users!

Why Data Models Matter
- Creating a Data Model Standard
- Pitfalls of bad models
- Standards of a Data Model
- Query Editor Best Practices
- DAX/Data View Best Practices
- Report View/Design Best Practices

Ask me anything with Explicit Measures

This is an ask me anything format for Mike Carlo, Seth Bauer and Tommy Puglia the creators of the Explicit Measures podcast

Let Me Sell You on Power BI Goals - The True Dashboard in Power BI

Quite possibly one of the most underrated features available in the Power BI platform is the new Power BI Goals & Scorecard feature set. Announced and released in 2021, Scorecards can dramatically change the way users view and consume high level metrics in their reports.

However, there are questions on the true impact of scorecards for users. This misunderstanding is due to the lack of knowledge that planning out the story and visuals themselves is the critical piece that will drive the true value for users.

This session focuses on what are goals in the Power BI Service, how to properly plan out a scorecard and goals, and utilizing a Power BI report to create a narrative between the two. In essence, Scorecards when set up properly are the true Dashboard in Power BI.

Session includes:
• Introduction to the components of a Power BI Scorecard
• Walkthrough of a complete Scorecard and Goal set up
• Utilizing a report to cater to a Scorecard
• Utilizing the potential of Power Automate within goals
• Blue printing a Scorecard for your next report
• Using Scorecards as a Dashboard

Dataflows for the "Enterprise" - ETL Best Practices

Join Tommy Puglia for a deep dive into the advanced features of Power BI Dataflows for the business. Commonly we think of dataflows for simple queries and loading, but using linked entities and computed entities, business and BI developers have amazing capacity and power available to them to truly load and transform at a great scale.

The session will focus on what use cases and a demo on creating computed entities, and show casing a workflow for them. Topics include:

- Dataflow best practices
- Linked & computed entities
- Using Bronze, Silver, Gold dataflows in production
- Use cases for these processes and business

Join Tommy Puglia for a deep dive into the advanced features of Power BI Dataflows for the business. Commonly we think of dataflows for simple queries and loading, but using linked entities and computed entities, business and BI developers have amazing capacity and power available to them to truly load and transform at a great scale.

The session will focus on what use cases and a demo on creating computed entities, and show casing a workflow for them. Topics include:

- Dataflow best practices
- Linked & computed entities
- Using Bronze, Silver, Gold dataflows in production
- Use cases for these processes and business

A Day With PowerShell - Exploring Another Layer of Power BI

There is a deeper layer from our amazing community and resources to audit, check, and manage data in Power BI using PowerShell. From easily extracting Activity data to running the Best Practice Analyzer across your entire tenant into a report (yes this is possible), there is another world out there for you to explore in Power BI.