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   Microsoft Power BI

What is the average graduate salary after 5 years?

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.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Power BI in schools - a student performance dashboard

This is one way to build a very simple Power BI report to track student assessment performance. It illustrates three things:

  • The importance of understanding relationships between tables, even in simple reports. Your Power BI model - the tables and the relationships/joins between them - is the foundation of good reports.

  • How some simple measures are needed to make the data and the report more useful.

  • Why it is important to keep the report as simple as possible - reports with lots of interactivity and multiple themes can be fun to create, but they often confuse users.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Slicer visualization in Power BI - filtering by date with help from a simple measure

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.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Power BI in schools - a simple way to look at student attainment

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.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Power BI in schools - prototype dashboards with MS Excel

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:

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   Microsoft Power BI

Schools, Data and Dashboards - Microsoft Power BI

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

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   Microsoft Power BI

Power BI in schools - how can you report on data from multiple MIS databases?

The real challenge for any school that wants to use a tool like Microsoft Power BI to analyse and report on data is how to get at data that is spread across different application databases - you want a solution that doesn’t involve lots of copy and pasting between different spreadsheets.

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   Microsoft Power BI

A first look at the UK HE longitudinal education outcomes dataset with Microsoft Power BI

How easy it to compare the earnings of graduates from different universities? Does a computer science graduate from Durham University make more money than one from the the University of Sheffield?

The Department for Education’s longitudinal education outcomes dataset is a good place to start. It’s a quick job to convert the data into an Excel table, fix the formatting on some of the columns (whole numbers rather than text) and then import it into Microsoft Power BI Desktop.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Using measures and filters to show two sets of data on a Power BI Radar Chart

The Power BI Radar Chart is a nice way to show how a set of values varies across multiple categories. And you can add further sets - so one radar chart shows two or more sets of values against the spokes. You then see at a glance how the different sets of values compare.

I used the radar chart to compare ‘predicted’ and ‘actual’ attainment levels in different subjects for school students. The table of sample data is shown below. The attainment levels are in one column and the type - ‘Predicted’ or ‘Actual’ is in another column. I’m interested in the average predicted and the average actual attainment level for each subject category.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Why data analytics with Microsoft Power BI might just be great for your school

You can use Microsoft Power BI to turn your in-house data into interactive data dashboards and reports. It’s now one of the top two or three business intelligence tools on the market and it’s a great solution for schools that want to get more value from the data they collect about students and learning.

Power BI is very accessible - it’s easy for the non expert to get started - and it is not expensive. With Microsoft Power BI you can:

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