This is the fourth installment in a series documenting the challenges, progress, setbacks, and victories of The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice. In this post, I’ll tell you about our 4th and 5th workshops (our most important and impactful workshops yet), and I’ll explain why I believe that every Power BI Community of Practice should host workshops like these as often as possible.

This is the third installment in a series documenting the challenges, progress, setbacks, and victories of The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice. In this post, I’ll tell you about our third workshop (including a summary of the foundational topic we covered and why it was so important for us to establish this baseline before moving on to more advanced topics), how we clawed our way back from the brink of disaster following our setback and began rebuilding the trust and confidence of our members, and our plans for ensuring that the Data Dojo will continue to grow and thrive for many years to come.

This is the second installment in a series documenting the challenges, progress, setbacks, and victories of The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice. In this post, I’ll share brief summaries of our first two workshops, and a cautionary tale about our first major setback.

I joined Des Moines University as a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst in December of 2020, and one of the first things I noticed whenever I got to know a colleague from another department was that many of them were eager to begin analyzing the data generated by their individual business units, but didn’t know where to start. Of course, there are tons of excellent books, videos, blogs, and self-paced e-learning resources about Power BI and data analytics in general, but I’ve found that the best way to learn is to do, and the best way to do is together. The natural solution was to establish an inter-disciplinary Power BI Community of Practice (CoP) at DMU, which is exactly what we are now in the process of doing. We call our CoP the Data Dojo, and I’m excited to share our journey with you. This is the first installment in a series that will document our challenges, progress, setbacks, and victories. In this installment, we’ll cover the founding of the Data Dojo, and next time, we’ll talk about the first two workshops we held, the topics we covered, some of the difficulties we’ve encountered since then, and how we plan to move forward from here. I hope you’ll join us on this adventure!

Many of you have probably heard of pbi-tools (by Mathias Thierbach). It’s a powerful command line application which can extract the source code from a Power BI Desktop (.pbix) file and save it in a folder as .json files. This is great for folks who want to save and track their changes to Power BI reports and datasets in a proper version control system, such as Git. However, because pbi-tools is a command line application, it must be run from a terminal window (like CMD or PowerShell). This is probably not a deterrent for those who are comfortable with the command line, but it can be a bit intimidating for those who are not. So I created a simple External Tool for Power BI Desktop that launches pbi-tools in a new PowerShell window with a single click of a button: PbiToolsWatchPS