Introduction

I’ve been using Microsoft Excel from the day it was released as a commercially available software package in 1987. Prior to 1987, I watched my buddy Dr Ben Hayes use Excel on his Mac.

I was jealous of what he was able to do with Excel, since we were in graduate school at the time. Ben was making all of us other students look bad since we didn’t have the same technology that he did.

Of any tool I have used, I have spent the most time in Excel, by far and away (almost 30 years now). For this reason, I have been eager to use Power BI to see how I can put my experience to good use.

Since I have been programming in VBA for a couple of decades, I just have a feeling that Power BI will be a tool that I can make good use of. This statement even becomes more important considering I have Alteryx on the brain and Alteryx is supporting PowerBI.

Tomorrow and Thursday, I will be starting my Power BI training. I plan on writing a few Power BI articles for others like me that may be Tableau-centric in their data visualization roles and experience. So if you are interested in learning about Power BI when you have Tableau on the brain, you might check back to see what else I have to say.

My First 5 Minutes With Power BI

If I can pick one word to give my first impression of Power BI, I’d say it would be delighted.

In 5 minutes, I was able to download and install the 64-bit version of Power BI. I was also able to click a button to access Google Analytics as a data source. Once I did that, I chose my 3danim8 blog analytics as a data source, and presto, I had a dashboard and reports that were automatically generated. For that reason, I am delighted as I didn’t really have to do any work at all.

This experience was very easy. In fact, at minute 4, I turned on my video recorder and made a 3 minute video (shown below) where I explored the content that was automatically created for me. I thought the content was very good, the layout was fine and the information I learned from this exercise was insightful. Therefore, my initial grade of Power BI for its ease of use is an A, maybe even an A+.

Tomorrow I will begin the more in-depth review of this platform and I’ll continue to document and give unbiased insights as they arise. Thanks for reading.

Impressions From My First Day Of Using #PowerBI

Part 2 of my Power BI evaluation is now written. Click here to read the article.