Blog

Sheaf Digital has developed a version of our Sheffield Apprenticeships vacancy search site for the new South Yorkshire Apprenticeship Hub (SYAH).

The SYAH vacancy site shows current live apprenticeship vacancies across South Yorkshire. The vacancy data comes from the gov.uk Apprenticeship Service API and is updated several times each day.

The Avanti Schools Trust HR department asked Sheaf Digital to replace a paper based recruitment requisition form with a simpler, more efficient software solution.

There are 12 schools in the Trust and the recruitment of new staff in a school - teaching and support staff - has to be approved by both the school's headteacher and a central team finance lead.

Sheaf Digital has developed a series of Power BI reports for the St Francis & St Clare Catholic Multi Academy Company (SFSCMAC) in Wolverhampton.

All 12 academies use the Arbor school management information system and the Power BI reports use data from Arbor’s Snowflake data warehouse. The way the data is organised in the data warehouse simplified the development of reports that now give the Trust a joined-up view of assessments, attendance and student demographics across all 12 academies.

Sheaf Digital recently delivered a one day intermediate level Power BI course to OSI Europe in Scunthorpe. The training was based on our Power BI Next Steps (intermediate) course and then tailored to be a better fit with the requirements of the OSI team.

Sheaf Digital recently delivered 4 days of Power BI Training to two separate groups from the business support team at Chesterfield College.

The training was based on our Get Started with Power BI course, but adapted to better meet the requirements of the Chesterfield College team. That’s our standard Power BI training approach - we talk to the client, find out more about the data they collect and then we build the training sessions around a series of bespoke training activities. Either we use dummy data or we use real client data to build functioning, useful dashboards.

These are some lessons learned and observations from the last 12 months of writing bespoke Power BI reports and delivering Power BI training to multi-academy trusts. They may help other schools and trusts that are about to start on a Power BI journey.

Most of the reports were bespoke reports that look at Key Stages 1 & 2 data - multi page reports that give the central team and staff with responsibility for school improvement a detailed overview of student performance across the trust.

The best Microsoft Power BI reports and dashboards are simple. They turn large sets of tabular data into user friendly, interactive visualisations that make it easier to spot data trends and other useful insights.

Simplicity really is the key. Just like with other kinds of software, users want an intuitive design that requires little or no effort to understand. Less is nearly always better.

The latest version of Marsden’s new weight tracking app is now live in the Google Play and Apple app stores. The app was designed and developed by Sheaf Digital.

The Marsden Weighing Group is based in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. For over 90 years, Marsden has been supplying high quality, accurate sales to the UK medical profession and industry. Marsden now sells a range of Bluetooth enabled scales. The Marsden Connect app can connect directly to one of these scales - weights can be downloaded and recorded without the need for manual input, thereby reducing errors and increasing data accuracy.

I wanted to backup a PostgreSQL database automatically to some offsite storage/server.

The first thing I had to do was decide where to put the backup. In the end I decided to use Azure as part of the solution. I know people say Azure’s expensive, but you can get a 12 month free trial. So at the time of writing, this solution doesn’t cost anything.

Power BI calculated columns and measures can be confusing at first - they seem to do almost the same thing. In the following example we use some simple school attendance data to explain why calculated columns and measures are different and we show you which one to choose when you want to do more analysis of your data.