Sheaf Digital Power BI Training - Chesterfield College

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.

For Chesterfield College we used a combination of manufactured data about student enrolments, attendance and performance together with some business planning/project management data.

The course outline looked something like this:

1. Writing reports with Power BI Desktop
2. Loading up data from Microsoft Excel.
3. A simple report based on data about apprenticeship starts
4. Tables and relationships in Power BI.
5. Simple calculated columns.
6. Simple measures - why not calculated columns?
7. A simple attendance report
8. A student dashboard
9. A look at how data is organised in Microsoft’s exemplar Adventure Works Power BI report.

The benefits of our approach are:

People learn by doing. A hands-on course like this is the best way for a beginner to get started with Power BI. The dummy education data makes the activities more relevant. We focused on a few basic concepts - how to get data into Power BI Desktop, how tables can be organised and the difference between calculated columns and measures.

Our Get Started with Power BI is the right choice for organisations that have little or no Power BI experience.