Report Design
Designing reports that communicate the stories hidden away in data in a way that is engaging and insightful isn’t as easy as it might sound.
There are many factors to consider. It's important that the key information stands out at first glance and users know how to interact with reports to discover their own insights.
Your reports and dashboards should be clean and well balanced, and you should ensure the use of colours encourages engagement rather than it looking like a patchwork quilt that frightens users away.
It's also important to know which charts to select depending on the story you're trying to tell. You should consider whether the information is comparative, such as 'sales this year vs last year', in which case you might use a bar chart, whereas if your story changes over time, then you could use a line chart. You should also consider that some people respond better to images and charts whereas some prefer to see the numbers in a table, try to accommodate both where you can.
We can help you to build the insightful and engaging reports that your audience expects - we can include elements of report design in any of our standard Power Bl courses, or we can deliver a bespoke course to suit your specific requirements.
System Design
Power Bl can and should deliver many benefits to users and the organisation as a whole. Clearly, being able to connect to a wide variety of data sources and build reports and dashboards within a few minutes is one of them.
There are a number of factors that can influence how easy the process can be, such as helping report designers to start with well-curated data sources where a lot of the heavy lifting around transformation and cleaning of data has already been done.
Also, making sure report designers know how to capitalise on existing data models and measures that have been built by colleagues and are available in the Power Bl service.
Having built your reports and dashboards you are most likely to want to share them with your colleagues and make sure they stay up to date. To make this possible, it requires advanced planning and a detailed understanding of Power BI’s various systems, such as choosing the right data Gateway and making sure the correct credentials are being used so data refresh happens as intended.
It doesn't matter whether your data is hosted locally in an on-premise SQL server or in a file in SharePoint, we have the knowledge and experience to help you through this sometimes tricky and frustrating part of the system design and deployment.