A couple of months ago I started as a working student at a consultancy firm. I was asked to create a dashboard for our internal recruitment department. Since I had zero knowledge of PowerBI, I was given some time and options to learn by following a couple of online trainings. What I learned at a later point was that it is nearly impossible to completely learn how to make a PowerBI dashboard by some online training, since real-world data is never as flawless as the training data is. So a tip in advance: do not bet on a simple training before creating your first dashboard.
After this dashboard, I was assigned to support a client where they were making a more complicated dashboard which covered financial data. The first internal dashboard was quite simple as it covered only 4-5 tables with less than a hundred rows and columns, but the financial dashboards covered tens of thousands of rows and a lot of columns and tables. With initially having zero knowledge of Power BI, I would now consider my skills as medium and this is partly thanks to ChatGPT. In my opinion, the tasks in which ChatGPT can support you can be divided into three categories.
- Finding things in Power BI
Power BI has a lot of features and options and as a newcomer it can be very hard to find the correct ones. By entering sufficient prompts into ChatGPT, you should be able to find any feature/option you want. In my opinion, the main difference with googling it, is that you do not need to visit several websites to finally find your answer. In the first screenshot, you can find an example.
- Finding and/or explaining DAX formulas
DAX is the ‘code language’ (it isn’t really programming code or something) which you use to create variables (which are necessary for building visualizations). As Power BI is a program by Microsoft, DAX has a lot of similarities to how you write functions in Excel. Although they are similar, they do – for some reason – have a lot of small differences. ChatGPT can be helpful to either find the relevant DAX formula you need or explain the differences between them. As seen in the screenshot, I asked ChatGPT to explain the difference between the 5 different DAX ‘count’ formulas.
- Formulating DAX formulas/input
Firstly, I had quite a lot of trouble by formulating the correct DAX formulas/input and my variables did not work. During the process I found out how to use ChatGPT appropriately. Since ChatGPT obviously is not able to write a 100% perfect DAX, I got used to entering abstract inputs and consequently adjusting them to my specific situation. I think this was the most useful application of leveraging ChatGPT when creating PowerBI dashboards. The last screenshot shows how it instructs me to properly use count- and filter- context when creating a variable.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I’ve been thinking about how more and more jobs are becoming remote or hybrid. I feel that this would carry implications for starters on the job market like us as far as being trained is considered. Given that we may not be able to quickly meet in person with someone more experienced, it may become tougher to ask the smaller and more frequent questions, with there being more of an expectation to figure things out yourself. Which of course relates back to your blog, ChatGPT is much greater at understanding context and adjusting details, than you may be able to figure out by the tutorials posted on the internet, which often assume perfect (or near perfect) datasets. While I personally don’t have any experience with Power BI, reading your post does make me feel confident that I’d be able to figure it out on the workplace with minimal guidance. A situation that I believe may become a bit too common post graduation.