Comparing actual numbers against your goal or budget is one of the most common practices in data analysis. So which visual type would you choose to represent these numbers? Microsoft Design & Data Visualization Lead Miranda Li reviews some likely candidates, and talks about why some visuals work better than others for your audience.
Are you ready to put your organization on a path of continuous improvement using the most valuable decision support techniques? Check out Microsoft Senior Program Manager Christian Berg’s timely series of essays on how to become your organization’s strategic advisor using Machine Learning and Power BI, available on the Community Blog. Each post takes on a different aspect of business intelligence, and includes a how-to section to get you started creating customized solutions for your team. Most analysis in the posts is done using the R language, but Christian tries to keep any scripts generic enough that anyone can apply them to their own data even without prior hands-on R experience.
The Microsoft Office team recently partnered with Levo, a network for millennials in the workplace to help navigate their career paths, to poll 1,500 community members to find out more about their productivity habits and challenges. The Office team was looking for an engaging way to share Levo’s findings with the media – one approach they took was to use Microsoft Power BI to produce an interactive and compelling report from the data. This report is an example using data visualization to enhance storytelling efforts by leveraging the Power BI publish to web capability on blogs, websites and news articles. Power BI has also proved to be a great tool for telling stories in broadcast media – one example is the recent election coverage from KING 5 News. As I dug through the data, I got to thinking about my own productivity habits and how I work with data to tell a story.
Today, I am happy to announce public preview of email subscriptions for report pages. This new feature allows you to subscribe to emails of the report pages that matter most to you, with just a few clicks. Once you’re subscribed, Power BI will regularly send screenshots of that report page directly to your inbox. The image in your inbox will show up exactly as it does in Power BI, and include a link to the report where you can drill into any interesting findings. Thanks to email subscriptions, it’s never been so easy to stay up-to-date about the data that matter most.
Have you visited the Power BI Community blog lately? Blog posts can be anything from opinion pieces on the latest industry trends, to helpful tips and how-tos for your fellow Power BI users, to even “trip reports” from your local User Group meeting or Microsoft event. Check out these great posts from October and learn how you can contribute your own posts!
