In partnership with Technitrain, on 21st September, I’ll be holding a Data Visualisation in SQL Server 2012 course in Dublin, Ireland. If you’d like more details, please click here to register
Key benefits
This course will enable you to create data visualisations that will help you and your colleagues interpret you data more effectively in Excel and Power View.
The course is being held at BT Training Solutions, Castleriver House, 14/15 Parliament Street, Temple Bar,Dublin 2, Ireland on 21st September. A breakdown of the course can be found here:
9:45 What is data visualisation? Here, we will talk about data visualisation, what is it not, and why is it important? How is it supported in the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence stack? How does it fit into the latest paradigm shift towards self-service Business Intelligence?
10:00 Finding patterns in the data. You will learn about the cognitive psychology process involved in finding patterns in the data, looking at some of the more well-known data visualisation examples in order to understand the rationale behind designing and creating a data visualisation. We will have an overview of Power View, and some new features in Excel 2010. We will look at the purpose of Power View – and what it isn’t designed to do. This section is intended to provoke discussion with topics such as (a) should a data visualisation be beautiful as well as informative? (b) to 3D, or not to 3D? (c) are pies just for dessert, or can we use them in charts too? (d) data journalism – can it mislead as well as inform? Although this section concentrates on the psychology and human perceptual processes of data visualisation, understanding the ‘why’ of data visualisation will ultimately mean that we become stronger ‘datavizzers’.
11:00 Break
11:15 Getting to Know your Data using Excel and Power View. An essential part of analysis is to know and understand the data. Both applications can be used to explore tabular models. In this session, we will look at how they can be used to explore your data, and when each application is best suited. We will also look at key features of understanding data, such as searching for dirty data, anomalies or inconsistencies.
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Data Visualisations. Using Power View, you will learn about query design and presentation layout in order to create visualisations in Power View. This includes various visualisations such as sparklines, motion charts (as in Hans Rosling’s BBC4 programme, ‘The Joy of Stats’), parallel co-ordinates.
14:45 Break
15:00 Power View in Depth. In this section, we will cover the complexities of displaying multivariate data, and how Power View can help. Here, we look at ways of displaying multivariate data such as parallel co-ordinates and crosstab arrangements of Tufte’s ‘small multiples’. We will also talk about Power View ‘under the hood’ by tracing its behaviour, and how it initially obtains its schema and metadata information from the source.
16:00 Break
16:15 Dashboards Putting it all together. Dashboards are more than simply placing a few reports on a page. We will look at the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of implementing Dashboards, KPIs and other visualisations in Excel and Power View.
17:30 Close
I hope to see you there!
