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A lot of small businesses start out with MS Excel. They are run on spreadsheets - information about customers, products, quotes and sales spread across multiple workbooks. Valuable data is inconsistent, almost impossible to query and often never backed up.

Sooner or later someone decides to look for a new, more scalable solution. They want a cloud based system that:

• Can be configured or tailored to fit the business.

• Is safe - there’s no risk that it’s going to disappear (with the data).

• Has low ongoing support and hosting costs.

• Is a good long term investment. A platform for future development as the business continues to grow.

This simple interactive dashboard will answer that question. It uses data from the Department for Education’s longitudinal education outcomes dataset. It tracks graduates 1 year, 3 years and 5 years after graduation and includes a breakdown for broad subject area and university.

The design of your software as a service application (SaaS) is inextricably linked to your business model. You should think seriously about how you’re going to find and sign-up paying customers before development starts. Does your SaaS application make customer acquisition as frictionless as possible? How does the design of the application facilitate marketing, customer feedback and the prioritisation of new features?

Perhaps you’re in the hospitality industry and you want to deliver basic food safety training to new starters. Or you work in social care and you want to put several staff through a Level 2 course in Dementia Awareness.

Elearning is a very viable alternative to traditional face-to-face training.

This is a rough guide to the costs of a bespoke learning management system. Of course it’s a very rough guide, but you get an idea of the possible costs and a starting point for further discussion with a software developer.

Here's how you can use the slicer visualization and a simple measure to filter time based data. The data is basic school attendance data.

There are two tables - Students and StudentAttendance. Not surprisingly, there’s a one to many relationship between them on StudentId. Every student gets two attendance marks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. ‘P’ for present, ‘U’ for unauthorised absence and ‘A’ for authorised absence.

A training provider that wants to put courses online is looking for a different kind of learning management system (LMS). Training providers have particular requirements - they want functionality that is closely aligned to the way they run their business.

What should a training provider look for in a learning management system? Here is a short list of things to think about.

This is one way of looking at student performance in Power BI. It’s a simple report built on top of single table of data about students and how they score in assessments.

Three things about the dashboard are worth noting:

• It’s designed to answer a single question - how well are our students doing? Some thought has gone into the layout of the dashboard. The visualizations are simple and it is very easy to use.

• The data behind it is also deceptively simple - a single Excel table of dummy data.

• It uses some basic ‘Measures’ - custom fields in Power BI that you add to the visualizations in your report. The measures do some extra work with the data. They’re not complicated but they are an extra step that requires a bit more Power BI expertise.

A quick way to get started with Microsoft Power BI is to connect to data in MS Excel spreadsheets. Spreadsheet data is easy to import and it means you can focus your efforts on dashboard design - prototyping ideas before sharing them with colleagues.

Here are five things to think about when using Microsoft Power BI with data stored in MS Excel spreadsheets:

Schools and academy trusts that want to use the data they collect to raise teaching quality and improve learner outcomes may face particular challenges.