KnowledgeWave Blog

Powering Up with Power BI: A Comprehensive Webinar Series

Written by Dan St. Hilaire | August 23, 2023

Recently, KnowledgeWave has been extensively discussing and instructing on the use of Microsoft Power BI. It's no surprise, given the exceptional capabilities of Power BI in terms of data visualization, analysis, and integration. We have been providing Power BI training for several years, but the surge in client inquiries has brought more attention to collaboration and report-sharing features. To meet this demand, we launched a Power BI webinar series that is currently in progress for our KnowledgeWave Learning Site members and has already been delivered to several organizations.

KnowledgeWave’s Power BI Series is a five-part 60-minute webinar series. 

  1. Power BI: Introduction and Workspace Setup
  2. Power BI: Designing, Transforming, and Connecting to Your Data
  3. Power BI: Planning for Time Intelligence and Data Relationships
  4. Power BI: Reports Building Basics
  5. Power BI: Publishing and Sharing your Reports + Advanced Tips 

This series is available on-demand now for our learning site members.

KnowledgeWave members can see all of our Power BI videos here.

The session descriptions are further down in this post, but before you read about them, I wanted to provide some additional background on the reasons why businesses are jumping to Power BI.  

  • Data Visualization: Power BI allows businesses to create interactive and visually appealing dashboards, reports, and charts to analyze and present data in a way that is easy to understand and interpret. This can help businesses make more informed decisions by quickly identifying patterns, trends, and outliers in their data.
     
  • Data Analysis: Power BI provides powerful data analysis tools that can help businesses gain insights into their data. These tools include the ability to perform ad-hoc queries, create custom calculations, and apply advanced analytics techniques such as machine learning and statistical analysis. 

  • Data Integration: Power BI can be used to integrate data from a variety of sources, including databases, cloud services, and spreadsheets. This makes it easier for businesses to consolidate their data and create a single source of truth for analysis. 

  • Collaboration: Power BI allows businesses to share dashboards and reports with colleagues and stakeholders in a secure and controlled manner. This can help improve communication and collaboration across teams, departments, and locations. 

  • Mobile Access: Power BI supports mobile devices, allowing users to access dashboards and reports from anywhere, at any time. This can help businesses stay connected and informed, even when they are on the go or on the production floor.  

Through Power BI, KnowledgeWave can visually display our production across member and private webinars, video content, live instruction events, coaching and consulting activities in a single report. With just a few clicks, we can gain insights into which topics we are most actively teaching, and how many private training events a particular instructor delivered during a specific time period. This comprehensive view helps us balance our resources more effectively and identify trends that can impact our future content creation.  

Most of our data is stored in a SharePoint List, which Power BI connects. We then publish the report to our SharePoint Teams Site and can access the report there or in Microsoft Teams. One of our executives has a custom visual based on our report that they filter and use in a monthly KPI meeting. 

If you want to make the most of Power BI and empower your team to use it effectively, subscribe to our Learning Site. Your team will gain immediate access to our on-demand Power BI series. If you have specific Power BI goals and need a customized learning experience, get in touch with KnowledgeWave to explore the possibilities. 

Detailed Power BI Series Outline Each Session is 60 Minutes: 

Power BI: Introduction and Workspace Setup 
Join us on your Power BI Journey as we start this 6-part series with a Power BI Overview. Through the series, we will address your Power BI workspace and Desktop setup, and you will learn how to connect, design, and transform your data. In this first session, we will review what Power BI offers, and how Power BI can help you effectively analyze and highlight the relevant information from your data. Power BI is data made visual, providing insights that help drive strategic actionable decisions across any industry. Power BI is available to Microsoft 365 users. In this session we will showcase some completed Power BI reports that are sure to get you excited about the Power BI possibilities. Throughout this series you will learn about data relationships, how to build reports, and the various ways that you can share them. In this first session, the focus is an introduction to Power BI, what it can do, and setting up your first workspace.

KnowledgeWave members can watch a recording of this session here.

Power BI: Designing, Transforming, and Connecting to Your Data 
Data is everywhere. With Power BI you can connect to almost any data source. In part 2 of our 5-part series, we will show you various data source examples, and how you can connect to multiple data sources including Microsoft Lists and Excel. 

KnowledgeWave members can watch a recording of this session here.

Power BI: Planning for Time Intelligence and Data Relationships  
Managing your data helps to build the dashboards you want to create. In part 3 of our PBI series, you will learn all about data relationships and will review the data table, create a data table with Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), and start to create relationships to model data. 

KnowledgeWave members can watch a recording of this session here.

Power BI: Reports Building Basics  
Part 4 of this 5-part series is all about the reports. In this webinar, we will overview report creation and create various reports and visuals with our connected data. After this session you’ll be the Van Gogh of your data, showcasing the data in dramatic and impactful ways. Data can be beautiful. 

KnowledgeWave members can watch a recording of this session here.

Power BI: Publishing and Sharing your Reports + Advanced Tips 
While you may love data, the goal is often to inform others. In the final session of our Power BI series, we will show you how you can publish your reports in your Power BI workspace, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint. Time to tell your story with a Power BI dashboard often called a canvas and now that you know the basics, we’ll get a little deeper with drill-downs, share some tips and tricks, and give you an introduction to Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). 

KnowledgeWave members can watch a recording of this session here.

What are Power BI Webinar attendees saying:

“Thank you! It's a lot to digest but I am looking forward to the resources so I can review it in the future as we try to implement more BI strategies. Thank you!” – Denise W - Non-profit 

“Excellent high-level presentation of Power BI capabilities. Very good presentation. Thank you.” – Wynne H – State Government 
 
“The session was very interesting. The instructor was very enthusiastic and explained the program well.” – Adrianna – State Government  

“Presenter was knowledgeable about the subject matter, enthusiastic in presentation making this an overall enjoyable learning experience.” Thomas L – State Government    

“Lots of functionality and integrations with other products. Good speaker and knowledgeable of features.” – Martha R – Railroad Commission 
 
“The instructor knowledgeable and a good presenter; examples shown were exactly what I was hoping to see was possible; considering we only had an hour in the first session, the presenter showed as much as possible, as far as the BI design options.” – Karen Stitt – Health and Human Services

About KnowledgeWave

For the past 20 years, KnowledgeWave has been helping companies deploy and adopt the latest business software. We stay up to date with the most recent software features and are constantly adding additional training to our online learning library, the KnowledgeWave Learning Site.

As a Microsoft Partner, we stay on top of all the newest features released within Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. We pride ourselves on having helped hundreds of organizations throughout North America deploy business solutions for their organizations.

If you are researching, considering, or planning on deploying Teams or Office 365 within your organization, let us help guide you through the process. We offer: