Power BI Training Course - Pocklington School
Sheaf Digital delivered a one day Microsoft Power BI training course at Pocklington School near York in January.
The training was a bespoke course - a version of our Get Started with Power BI course, but adapted to be a better fit with the requirements of the school.
Pocklington School uses the iSAMS school management information system and an important objective during the training day was understanding how data from iSAMS - exported as a spreadsheet - could be imported into Power BI.
The Power BI training course content included:
- Loading up data from Microsoft Excel - formatting data as an Excel table. Building a simple multi-page report with slicers, matrices and other visuals.
- Calculated columns and measures - understanding the difference and how they are used.
- Relationships between tables and the importance of a star schema design. Table joins and filter propagation.
- Using date tables to report on time series data.
Sheaf Digital Power BI courses are always hands-on. The content is delivered through a series of activities - small report developments - that reinforce understanding of the principles/ideas in the content.
Activities during the Pocklington School training day included:
- Building a 3 page report using publically available apprenticeships data.
- Using calculated columns and measures to analyse and report on student attendance data.
- Developing a more sophisticated student data dashboard that uses multiple tables of data & a date table.
We covered a lot of ground on the day, but we made good use of the time. One challenge that Pocklington School faces is finding a sustainable solution for importing student progress data into Power BI from iSAMS that doesn’t involve repeated manual editing of data in Excel. The solution - developed by Sheaf Digital as preparation for the training day - was an opportunity to look in depth at data transformation in Power BI with Power Query.
Power BI in Schools
Our bespoke support and training for schools and MATs that want to leverage the full potential of Microsoft Power BI.
Our Get Started with Power BI is a good choice for organisations that have little or no Power BI experience. We offer both an education sector version of that course and a version for clients in other industries. Both are built around practical, hands-on activities.
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