Microsoft BI Consultancy

Helping People Visualise their Business Data to make better Business Decisions.

Hi, I’m Francis Logan and I deliver consultancy services to develop Microsoft Power BI reporting and visualisations. This is achieved from a range of data sources, from SQL Server to Excel to a Sharepoint list to online social media data. The options are endless!

Once the connection is made to the data source Power BI has functionality to Transform the data into a workable format, for example aligning your data against a fiscal calendar, or building in extra calculated fields that aren’t in the original source.

Developing the report is done using various forms of visualisations, charts, gauges, single headline cards, tables, slicers to filter the information on screen. Akin to Excel formulas and functions there are a raft of functions within Power BI, known as DAX. This allows me to develop combinations of functions to show Sales Ranking, Average Order Values, show Numbers of Jobs by Hour of Day, travelling times etc.

Another powerful tool within Power BI is Row Level Security, where you have a group of users of the reports and you want to restrict what they see within the data. Be it for security so one customer can only see their visualisations, or for context if a person is responsible for a region or country. Developing this with the DAX functions means when a user signs in with their email address this is linked to each line in the underlying data so the data is never compromised.

Power BI also contains mapping functionality and can calculate distances are points/boundaries on a map from post codes, or longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates for extra accuracy. These can then be transformed into Heat Maps, or Satellite Road Maps, to review where business is being done, or overlaying demographic business data to show for example where businesses 11-50 are in relation to your current working area.

I can take branding into consideration and instead of adding fonts, colours individually when building a report this can be pre-built using a Microsoft custom theme that can be applied in one go.

Once the report is built I can deliver it by means of an online training session, though in most circumstances because of my design principles it’s easy enough to use from first look and because it’s built on your requirements.