I’m excited to announce that something new is coming to the Power BI community in 2021: Workout Wednesday!
Workout Wednesday started in the Tableau community and is expanding to Power BI in the coming year. Workout Wednesdays present challenges to recreate a data-driven visualization as closely as possible. They are designed to help you improve your skills in Power BI and Tableau.
How You Can Participate
Watch for the Power BI challenge to be published on Wednesdays in 2021. The challenge will contain requirements and a dataset. Use the dataset to create the desired end result.
Then share your workout! You can post your workout to the Data Stories Gallery or your blog, or just share a public link. If you aren’t able to share a public link – perhaps because that option is disabled in your Power BI tenant or you don’t have a Power BI tenant– a gif, a video, or even some screenshots are just fine.
To formally participate: Post to Twitter using both the #WOW2021 and #PowerBI hashtags along with a link/image/video of your workout. Include a link to the challenge on the Workout Wednesday site. And please note the week number in your description, if possible.
Community Growth
I’m looking forward to Workout Wednesdays for a couple of reasons. First, I think Power BI needs more love in the data visualization department. We need to be talking about effective visualization techniques and mature past ugly pie charts and tacky backgrounds. And I think Workout Wednesdays will help us individually grow those skills, but it will also foster more communication and sharing of ideas around data visualization in Power BI. That in turn will lead to more product enhancement ideas and conversations with the Power BI team, resulting in a better product and a stronger community.
Second, I’m also excited to see the crosspollination and cross-platform learning we will achieve by coming together as a data visualization community that isn’t focused on one single tool. There is a lot Tableau practitioners and Power BI practitioners can learn from each other.
Join Me In January
Keep an eye out on Twitter and the Workout Wednesday website for the first challenge coming January 6. While it would be great if you did the workout for every single week, don’t be concerned if you can’t participate every week. A solution will be posted about a week later, but nothing says you can’t go back and do workouts from previous weeks as your schedule allows.
I look forward to seeing all of your lovely Workout Wednesday solutions next year!
Hi Meagan and thanks for this initiative. I’m really excited about it and we should hopefully see some really creative stuff coming out of it.
One question I’ve been meaning to ask: is it “within the rules” to use tooling that can generate bespoke visualisations, such as Charticulator, R, Python, HTML or even developing custom visuals? Most of my contributions to the community are within this area and I see a lot of potential for some growth in knowledge for others if I can attempt and document my approaches in this space.
Hi, Daniel. You probably won’t see much development of custom visuals in Workout Wednesday as that isn’t a skill most Power BI creators have. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a workout or two in the future that uses the Charticulator or maybe HTML. Since the general idea is to replicate what was made and figure out how it was done, there might not be that much opportunity to incorporate custom visual development, but custom visual usage is probably fair game. And if you want to riff off of something we do and make it better by creating a custom visual, feel free. Once we get things up and running for a bit, maybe we can collaborate on a workout that includes the Charticulator?