Still Waters Run Deep

Yeah, we haven’t had a post here since October.  But that doesn’t mean things haven’t been going on!

We started as a blog – in 2009! – and I suspect that many longtime followers still think of us as just that.  But we’re actually a company, so we now spend a lot of our time doing company things:  Client Work, Planning, Hiring and Expansion, Creating New Service Offerings, Revising Existing Offerings, Company Meetings, the list goes on – and more on this below.  That stuff tends to interfere with walking up to this particular microphone (the blog, I mean).

And, I’m not sure the world needs another DAX post.  We alone have written nearly a thousand (!) in the decade since the site launched, and unlike a decade ago, there are now hundreds of blogs and YouTube channels doing those sorts of things – many of whom are doing a frankly fantastic job.  We might have been the first “water cooler” for this stuff, but we’re very happy to not be the last, and we’re thrilled to see the explosion in content.

But if blog post number One Thousand and Seventy (today’s) isn’t a significant contribution to the community, it’s harder to justify the investment of time and energy.  Blogging is good for business, sure, but that was never the thing that Made it Work.  The desire to move the needle and share this amazing gift with the world – THAT was what drove the blog during the “golden years” – back when this Power BI stuff was all (somehow) a big secret.

So now that The Secret is Out, and Power BI is a Household name…  now what?  Well, we need to find new ways to contribute.  Ways to scratch that “contribution” itch.  Ways to fill gaps in the rest of the content out there.  It’s a touch challenge!  Things like NoCheckdowns are an example of scratching that itch successfully.  We’re going to be thinking this year about how to help out in other ways too.

New Class:  Visualization and Storytelling with Power BI

Speaking of NoCheckdowns, that project was a real eye opener in terms of Power BI’s current capabilities in the visualization and interaction sense.  Yeah, we’ve been watching the monthly updates just like everyone else of course.  But a project whose goal is “deliver an exciting and compelling experience to a consumer-level audience who doesn’t care one bit about BI” is a higher bar than we normally encounter.  And boy did Power BI deliver!  It was a rare opportunity to take stock of everything that’s been added over the years.  There’s SO much capability in there now – enough that the visual layer is now on par with DAX and M in terms of things to learn, techniques, tricks, and patterns.

So for the first time in three years, we’ve added a new 2-day course to our workshops menu.  Designed as a logical follow-on to our Foundations course, “the viz class” covers everything in Power BI that you can do “after” you’ve got a good data model built – which is a LOT of power, thanks to multiple years of monthly updates from Microsoft.

Click Here to View More Details About the Class

And while we’ve primarily designed this course as a “next step” for those who’ve learned data modeling, DAX, and power query already, we’ve also made sure that it is ALSO a good class for folks who haven’t yet decided whether they want to learn DAX.  So, you CAN take this new class without prior knowledge of DAX or M.

It’s also a good class for those of us who finally got good at making aesthetically-appealing reports in Excel, but now feel like we have to start over in the Power BI canvas.  We know that Excel folks are usually not artists, and so this course is geared around giving you “formulas” of sorts – easy-to-follow, methodical ways to make things look good AND be user-friendly.

Also Available as a Private Class

If you have multiple people at your company who would benefit from this class, it may be more effective (both cost and otherwise) for us to come run it privately for your team, onsite.  Usually the breakeven in benefit starts at around five or six people.  If you’d like to know more, drop us a note at [email protected].

More to Come Soon

I don’t want to give everything away all at once, but to give you an idea, we’ve been reinvesting a lot of 2019’s revenues – six figures’ worth – into some of the things you’ll be seeing over the next few months.

With most of the spoilers redacted, here’s the cover of our internal team holiday card from the end of the year illustrating the plan:

Redacted Version of our Team Holiday Card Hints at the Scale of Invisible (So Far) Investment

Anyway, here’s a little teaser of things to come:

• We’ll be launching another Power Platform class this Spring (beyond the aforementioned Visualization and Storytelling with Power BI).
• There’s more to come where NoCheckdowns came from.
• Big changes are coming to this humble site, which was last significantly updated in 2015.
• Multiple new Power BI and broader Power Platform consulting offerings also coming soon.

2020 is going to be a big year for everyone in this line of work, and we’re excited to still be a part of it ten years in.

Thanks everyone for being with us on this journey 🙂