Engaging Q&A and Discussion (with Amir Netz) - Microsoft Fabric's CTO !!

DESCRIPTION 📄

Please join Microsoft Fabric's CTO Amir Netz and me as I host this special livestream where we'll have an engaging discussion and audience Q&A on everything Microsoft Fabric. We'll discuss everything from: data and AI, Synapse, Spark/Notebook, OneLake/DirectLake, and what Fabric means for the future of Power BI. Tune in to find out!

GUEST BIO 👤

Amir Netz is a Technical Fellow and the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric is a complete, unified, SaaS data platform that brings together all tools that organizations need to run their data estate. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a unified product, empowering data, and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI.

Before that Amir served as the founder and CTO of Microsoft Power BI.

Used by 98% of the Fortune 500 companies, Power BI is widely recognized as the market’s leading Business Intelligence product, with the fastest growth and the highest usage.

Amir is the leading world expert in BI and Business Analytics technology. The products invented, designed, and developed by Amir have repeatedly defined the business analytics market. In 1997 Amir founded SQL Server Analysis Services, a product that with its ease-of-use and low-cost had democratized the BI industry and quickly became the most popular BI server in the world. Today, Power BI is driving a similar transformation in the Cloud.

The technologies that Amir invented are shipping as part of SQL Server, Excel, and the Microsoft Power Platform. Some of his latest contributions include VertiPaq, Microsoft’s revolutionary in-memory column-oriented data engine that excels at performance and flexibility for data analysis, Q&A – the natural language BI exploration experience, Dataflows – a popular self-service data preparation platform, and the Power BI experience – for interactive ad-hoc data visualization and exploration.

The special designation of “Technical Fellow” is Microsoft’s acknowledgement of the key role a top technical leader plays in driving intentional innovation with broad industry impact. A Technical Fellow's technical vision, expertise and world-class leadership is commensurate with that of a corporate vice president focused on business leadership.

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(Livestream Replay) The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice - with James Bartlett

DESCRIPTION 📄

In recent years, data-driven decision making has become the gold standard for all organizations, and data literacy is more important now than ever before. Organizations large and small must become intimately familiar with their data or risk falling behind the competition and fading into irrelevance. One of the best ways to foster an active, passionate data culture within an organization is to establish a Community of Practice around the technologies the organization uses to process, store, analyze, and consume data.

Join us as we discuss the founding and early stages of The Data Dojo: a Power BI Community of Practice which was established at Des Moines University to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience among faculty and staff interested in analyzing data generated by the various departments and other business units in the organization.

We'll also talk about the founding principles and structure of the Data Dojo, some of the topics we've covered at our workshops, what has gone right, what we could have done better, and what we're planning for the future.

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James D. Bartlett III is a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst and Power BI Administrator at Des Moines University in Iowa, USA. He started working in IT way back in 2002, while he was a student in the Business Administration program at Colorado State University. After graduation, James dabbled in banking, real estate, healthcare, and even had a short stint as a resident DJ at Denver's top nightclub, before finally stumbling upon his true calling in the Business Intelligence field in 2018.

James is a Microsoft Certified Power BI Data Analyst Associate, co-developer of the Business Ops and Power BI Version Control apps on PowerBI.tips, and co-leader of the Iowa Power BI User Group. In his spare time, James enjoys longboarding, playing the guitar, and producing electronic music in his home studio.

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Power BI Visual Revolution - AMA (Ask me anything) with Miguel Myers

ABSTRACT 📄

Miguel Myers is a former member of the Power BI customer advisory team helping customers with report design and data visualizations, and recently has become the product manager of core visuals in Power BI. He is bringing a new vision and dynamics to a transformation that will define the future of visualizations in the tool.

This session will cover the robust roadmap and Miguel's vision for Power BI, and it will also be an opportunity for you to ask anything you want about his life, career, goals, work, plans, features, and more!

GUEST BIO 👤

Miguel Myers is a principal program manager at Microsoft that is passionate about data visualizations, graphic design, and marketing. He is now leading the new generation of visuals and Power BI as product manager.

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(Livestream Replay) Where to Find Data for your Power BI Practice? - with Roland Szirmai

ABSTRACT 📄

While it’s easy to download the official Advetureworks database from Microsoft to sharpen your Power Query / DAX / Dataviz skills in Power BI, it’s not always the most interesting data. If you truly want to immerse yourself in learning about how to transform less structured data, create measures that reflect more than just YTD Sales or practice how to best place your visuals on the canvas I reckon the most useful data is something that interests you!

In this livestream Roland and I will talk about 3 different examples where data can be found and if needed “created”.

Starting from a more structured, government issued dataset about road accidents in Australia. Then looking at a visitor information based on a shopping center data and visualizing busy areas and periods. And lastly, exploring resident information in a block of building, a dataset that anyone can easily replicate – even without any SQL skills.

Roland will also showcase that in our modern life we can find data everywhere and that could be used in our Power BI learning journey or to showcase some of your skills online or prep for a job interview.

GUEST BIO 👤

Roland Szirmai is an Analyst with 12+ years of experience in Financial, Commercial, and Operational reporting. Roland creates reports to express the true meaning behind numbers in an understandable way using modern tools such as Microsoft Power BI.

He uses his skill, knowledge, and expertise in Excel, Power Query, DAX, and Data Visualisation to help organizations transform from assumptions and guesswork to more informed, data-driven decisions making.

Roland is the creator of BI-Lingual Analytics a YouTube channel and blog dedicated to helping non-technical people learn more about and master Power BI.

People can find useful guides and videos on how to use this tool and sometimes just fun data-related articles. It’s all about helping business users to master Power BI and analytics – without too much IT involved.

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