1. Understanding Your Numbers: Data Visualisation with PowerBI
11/26/2018 3:20 PM
Understanding Your Numbers: Data Visualisation with PowerBI
Camilla Longden (Microsoft Research)
Mahum Butt (Newcastle University)
Introductions:
Name, institution.
2 minutes
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

2. So I’m going to start by talking about data.
11/26/2018 3:20 PM
So I’m going to start by talking about data.
Research is all about running experiments, getting data and making predictions by analyzing those results.
To use the data we obtain, we have to understand it.
Often it comes in the form of raw numbers – not easy to use.
And there’s a lot of it.
We use statistics and create plots to try and make our lives easier.
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

3. How do most projects deal with data?
How we currently deal with data.
Static plots (examples from matplotlib).
Tables of data in Excel.
Manually created and imported.
But every time you want to change something, it’s hard.
Rerun script.
Update table.
These are problems, requiring manual effort.

4. What is Power BI?
Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your organization. Connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify data prep, and drive ad hoc analysis. Produce beautiful reports, then publish them for your organization to consume on the web and across mobile devices. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique, 360-degree view of their business. And scale across the enterprise, with governance and security built-in.
Here to talk today about PowerBI, a visualisation tool that solves this.

5. What is Power BI?
Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your organization. Connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify data prep, and drive ad hoc analysis. Produce beautiful reports, then publish them for your organization to consume on the web and across mobile devices. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique, 360-degree view of their business. And scale across the enterprise, with governance and security built-in.
PowerBI is a tool for analysing your data
Dashboard full of charts.
Easy to add new metrics.
Plots you can show to your manager or even put into your paper.
Takes time to make them nice.
Personalized – dashboard, but also input and visualisation.
And keeps data secure.

6. Here’s a diagram showing how PowerBI works.
PowerBI is ultimately a service.
Locally use the desktop app to create a dashboard.
Connect to your data source
Add plots you want.
Publish to the web.
Web then updates automatically.
Access via the web or apps on device.

7. Out of the box - Existing visuals

8. BUT
You can create custom visualisations, which can then be used.
There is a whole marketplace of (free) custom visualisations that function exactly like the default ones.

9. So, just to give a bit of background about the Creative Fuse North East Project:
It’s a partnership between the five universities of the North East, to get an accurate assessment of the CDIT sector.
We’re assessing their incomes, their lifestyles, what draws them to the North East, and what we, as a region, are investing in creativity; where that investment is going, and how can we improve the return of our investment.

10. Now, to start with, we were collecting data from a lot of different sources: surveys, public databases, private databases… and we ended up with loads of information about hundreds of companies across the North East.
But we couldn’t distribute it without violating data protection.
It was a major issue! – How are we supposed to keep the data stored and secured in the UK, without putting it up online, while still making the visuals available to the world?
This is where Power BI came in!
The best thing for us was the guarantee that our data source was secure and safe in UK-based data centres. And the embedded security meant that the data itself was never publicly available. It would only ever be the visualisations and the data we chose to put on the visuals that would be accessed by the public. So, everyone’s personal information was super secure!

11. Phew. Okay, so we got the legal stuff out of the way
Phew! Okay, so we got the legal stuff out of the way. We made a bunch of visuals that were super pretty and awesome.
They were going to look great in our report.
But there was another issue we suddenly noticed – everyone who was writing the report needed to be able to see the visuals. And we didn’t really know how to do that.
We couldn’t put them online just yet, otherwise the public would see them. And sending s with the updates over and over was so exhausting. Since we were collaborating across multiple universities, we couldn’t just secure them within our own, private systems. So, it had to be somewhat public, right?

12. But then, Power BI handled that for us too
But then, Power BI handled that for us too! We were able to make a private group for everyone involved, no matter what institution they were from. As long as they had a Power BI account, we were able to add them to the group.
This simplified our collaboration process, without compromising the security of the data.

13. Now that the initial report has been published, and our data and is secure and shared, both privately and publicly, we’re really able to focus on improving our visuals for the secondary report and incorporating the more interactive features of Power BI for the website.

14. We’re able to use the custom embedded visuals, custom importable visuals, and even make our own visuals to suit the needs of our report and project. That’s meant that Power BI has been just as useful to me, as a developer, as well as my peers, who come from various non-technical backgrounds too!

15. Conclusions and web links
In summary.