Group and Merge Data for Calculations in Power Query

This video show how to use the group by and merge capabilities in Power Query with in an example use case. This was an actual use case where management was trying to track the completion rate for workers for courses they needed to take over multiple quarters as part of an employee development initiative. This involved figuring out what courses employees took, the completion counts per manager and the completion rate of the managers respective of their total employee population. This could usually be done with copying and pasting data table, performing lookups, calculation totals and finally formatting it in one table for upper management consumption. Doing all those task takes time so if this could be done in ONE click, it would save time. So Power Query can do this and very effectively. See the video to learn how.

Use the FREQUENCY Function

A common activity in analyzing a bunch of data is to categorize it. One way to do that is to put it into bins or buckets of ranges. For example if you have a list of ages you may want to put the count of people is the age range of decades like 0 to 10 and then 11 to 20 and etcetera. You can use the FREQUENCY function to do this simple categorization. See the video to learn how.

Chord Diagram in Power BI

A Chord Diagram or Network Radial Diagrams as a type of chart that is popular in data viz programs. You can't find it in Excel and not natively in Power BI. However it is a data visual that you can import from the Power BI marketplace (and it's from Microsoft). It's a visually appealing chart and quite popular to data viz practitioners. You might think that making this is hard, but with the chord data visualization import from the marketplace, it's really easy. And you don't need fancy programs like R or Python.