Power BI Training

The department of Data Science organised a series of session on Power BI for 3rd year BSc students. Power BI is a Data Visualization and Business Intelligence tool that converts data from different data sources to interactive dashboards and BI reports. Power BI suite provides multiple software, connector, and services. Being a data science student it necessary for them to visualize the result. Therefore, the department with collaboration with the Data Science lab Pune, organized a Five (5) day session for 3rd year BSc students Data Science Department.

Ms. Rujuta and Mr. Sachin introduced the software of Power BI Desktop to the students of 5 BSC. They began by introducing the layout of tabs and tools of the software compatible with Microsoft. They initiated by the plausible and possible ways of importing data into the workspace.

The general methodology would be to import an excel spreadsheet, however one could import spreadsheets from the web by using the URL and Power BI allows you to access the visible tables on the webpage.

Secondly, they discussed the general tabs – Home, Insert, Modeling etc and the three views – Report, Data and Model. Ms. Rujuta introduced the Power Query Editor Window and tool simultaneously.

On this day of the workshop, the instructors visited and exposed the various options of visualization under the visualization bar, the fields and filter bars. Majorly focused on “slicer” visual that essentially helps manage the filters over all the visualization in a dashboard.

Moreso, they traversed through the steps of using Power Query Editor to edit the columns and rows to our preference of data fields.

On the second day of the session the students were introduced to the following features in the power bi dashboard:

Card: A Power BI card is useful to show a single number or metric value of number, date, text. Using the columns of count Id and Average sales students created cards to show the metric value of the total count and average.

Slicer: Slicers in Power BI are a type of on canvas visual filters. The slicers enable a user to sort and filter a packed report and view only the information they want. Columns such as category and date of order were used to create the slicers to make the dashboard more interactive.

Stacked Bar Chart: under this chart a new feature was introduced called Top N. under the filter section as to make the students understand how to extract any top N values from the dataset.

Treemap: the same filter introduced here also and students were explained how to read this graph.

Grouping of a card and Chart: to make the donut chart more informative, students learned how to group the two chart and the card.

On day 3, essentially the workshop was led by recreating various dashboards with the instructors’ help. In the class, students explored more ways to make the data visualization dashboards to be more interactive by using buttons for page navigation of as slicers.

The students used various HR, Supply Chain databases to make relations and visualize for more findings.

The visualizations were created using various visualization – maps, bars, area chart etc. The class withheld various discussions on which chart is most useful for the features to present and features required for the particulars of a visualization, for eg. Geographical maps required data like latitude-longitude values. An interesting feature, the tooltip visualization that effects the graph that one hovers upon show more information points or visualization constructions bifurcating information, and further used to add to the dashboard.

On the fourth day of the session the students created the dashboard with Employee Absenteeism and were introduced to the following features in the power bi dashboard:

Area Chart: it the same as Line Chart, where the Area between the X-Axis and lines are filled with a colour.

Line and Stacked column chart: students learned hoe to combine two different columns with common basis of comparison with the help of this chart.

Tooltip: it is an extra data labels on the visual other than the used field values to the visualization. Students were taught how to add the tooltip on the area chart to add more information to the chart and also which columns to choose for the same.

Legend: under the area chart the concept of the legend was introduced to make the chart more categorized for the user discretion.

At the end of session, a google form quiz was also taken by the session heads to assess the knowledge gained by the students. Two students one from 5BSc EA and 5BSc DS were chosen for their best dashboard and were told to present it in the session. Likely Four Students volunteered to present the work they did in the last four session.