Skip to main content

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so!


a white background' the words 'using powerBI to make KPI dashboards', a person with tan skin in bright clothing is looking at a paper


I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following:


  • Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred


And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable, so how similar is it? And can I write about it?" 

First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook. 

Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here, at the AWS Data Exchange.

Like stocks, but not.


I first downloaded a dataset about Carvana sales from a group called Saturn Data, and you can find it here as a .CSV.

The web app somehow read my download information and uploaded it to PBI. Before I made the dashboard, I played around with making reports.


I used the auto-generate feature to create data - not a dashboard - of the Carvana sales in a certain year. The commit note says it was committed in August of 2022, so probably in the 2020 - 2021 range.

Here's a quick walkthrough video. 



I now gathered some data about airlines from A Skytrax Dataset here on GitHub and used the Drill Down feature.

It's very interesting to see how deep the data-hole goes. I can check out how many people bought food on a trip from Auckland to Los Angeles, and the corresponding pie chart even tells me which month (July) it happened in.

And here is some more adjustments on filtering using the New York City Real Estate Sales Data -- Note the change of visuals.


Let's adjust the visualizations to be a little friendlier to read.



I created a dashboard with a scorecard -- A built in feature that we use to track metrics. Mine says "How can we increase Jeeps sales in the next quarter?" -- I even attached the starting point of 88.01k Jeeps sold to the actual data set -- It could update in real time!

A PowerBI dashboard with a scorecard


Overall, I don't find PowerBi to be as intuitive as Tableau, though it is a lot easier to get started with, and there's a web option, so you don't have to download PowerBi. The desktop version can attach to Azure Databricks, to pull your stored data into the program to contort and shape into something usable for your business.

If any of this helps you, give this post a share.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

 If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return.   In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory