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 Part 1, I shared the story of how I founded the Data Dojo at Des Moines University (DMU). In Part 2, I talked about our first two workshops, and shared a cautionary tale about our first major setback. In this post, I’ll tell you all 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 Our plans for ensuring that the Data Dojo will continue to grow and thrive for many years to come

This is the second in a series of posts documenting the challenges, progress, setbacks, and victories of The Data Dojo: A Power BI Community of Practice. In Part 1 of this series, I shared the story of how I founded the Data Dojo at Des Moines University (DMU), and 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.

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).