Newly Launched: Data Visualization in Power BI

My latest DataCamp course has soft launched: Data Visualization in Power BI.

This course takes you through the different visuals offered in Power BI, but it does a lot more than simply iterate through a list. Throughout the course, we will mix insights of psychology with practical implementation in Power BI. If you’ve seen my Eyes on the Prize talk, you’ll see a lot of thematic overlap, but this course gives me a chance to expound on some of the most important ideas and also show them in action. If you haven’t gone through a DataCamp BI course before, each chapter has two lessons, and each lesson has two sections: a conceptual section and an exercises section.

For this course, the conceptual section was primarily around the psychology of dashboard design, giving you a feeling for why you might want to do something. Then, the exercises section shows you how to do it, and then you get an opportunity to try things out in 3-4 exercises working with Power BI in a VM. All in all, I think it’s a really good way of teaching by doing. It especially disciplines someone like me, who tends to go off to cloud-cookoo land in talking about abstract ideas. They have a soft word cap on each video and then a hard word cap. I’d typically come in 30-40% above the hard word cap and then need to get rid of most of the tangents, tighten up my phrasing, and really think about whether this is the best way to state something. There are a few things I wasn’t able to sneak in, but on the whole, I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Finally, as an SME for the course, I’d normally be behind the scenes, as I was for the course on Data Modeling in Power BI. My job is to build the outline, develop the exercises, write out the scripts, and create the slides, leaving recording and final go-through for others. But because I kept showing up on calls with a fancy microphone they let me do the voiceover work for the first two chapters. So I’ve got that going for me.

Anyhow, go check out the course. If you don’t have a DataCamp account, you can still see the first chapter for free.

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