Conferences, Data Visualization, Microsoft Technologies, Power BI

Data Visualization Panel at PASS Summit

Next week is PASS Summit 2017, and I’m excited to be a part of it. One of the sessions in which I’m participating is a panel discussion on data visualizationMico Yuk will be our facilitator. I’m in great company as the other panelists are Ginger Grant, Paul Turley, and Chris Webb. This session will be on Wednesday (November 1) from 4:45pm – 6:00pm.

We’ll be taking questions on Slack in the #visualization of sqlcommunity.slack.com. So if you need advice or have been curious about some aspect of data viz, join us in room 2AB and send us your question via Slack.

If you are curious about my views on data viz, I wrote a sort of beginner’s guide for data viz in Power BI in the book Let Her Finish: Voices from the Data Platform (Volume 1).

I hope to see you at PASS Summit!

Books, Conferences, Microsoft Technologies, Power BI

Let Her Finish: Voices from the Data Platform

This year I had the pleasure of contributing a chapter to a book along with some very special and talented people. That book has now been released and is available on Amazon!  Both a digital and print version are available. My chapter is about data viz in Power BI, combining platform agnostic concepts with practical applications in Power BI.

The other chapters are:

  • Azure Data Catalog by Melody Zacharias (b|t)
  • Biml for Beginners: Script and Automate SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Development by Cathrine Wilhelmsen (b|t)
  • Care and Feeding of a SQL Server by Jen McCown (b|t)
  • Indexing for Beginners by Kathi Kellenberger (b|t)
  • Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan by Rie Irish (b|t)
  • Using Extended Events to figure out why an application is slow by Mindy Curnutt (b|t)

Special thanks to Rie and Melody for putting this together and for being awesome and inspiring.

We may all be women authors, but this book isn’t about WIT issues. We each got to write about an area of the data platform in which we have expertise.

If you’d like to support us, or are just curious what we have to say, you can pick up a copy on Amazon or purchase a copy at PASS Summit. If you are going to be at PASS Summit, you can also stop by the WIT Happy Hour/book release party on Oct 31 or the panel session on Nov 2.

For more information, check out the website (kindly provided by SentryOne, who sponsored the book).

It’s tough to write a book chapter about a technology that changes every month, but I think the content holds up fairly well a few months after writing it. A few things changed on me (e.g., the Office Store for custom visuals is now App Source, and drillthrough actions exist now), but my approach to data viz in Power BI is still relevant and in use today with several clients. I hope you’ll give it a read and let me know what you think.