Well, MS Ignite is over for another year. I planned to visit loads of sessions, but the reality was that I spent many hours on the Visio booth. Fortunately, many of them were recorded, including ours, but I don’t have time to watch over 700 videos! So, I looked through them all and picked out 50-odd, and used Get & Transform in Excel again to create suitable queries to link to Visio.
The more I use PowerQuery, the more I like it. I was able to extract the unique values in the Personas, Tags, and Products columns which each contained comma separated lists. I data-linked these values to large circles on different pages, and data-linked the Sessions to Watch to hexagonal shapes. I then wrote a little VBA code to link the circles to the hexagons with data-linked connectors. Data Graphics was applied to all shapes, including the connectors, and a legend added. Each of the Session hexagons have an automatically created hyperlink to the On-Demand Video. I used a standard radial page layout so that I had minimal manual movement shapes.
The end result is a visual dashboard by Persona, Tag and Product to open the videos for the sessions I want to watch.
PowerBI
Power Map is looking pretty powerful!
I watched a presentation today about some of the new features of Power Map. I was impressed, and the surprising thing is that the data does not have to be location data to get a 3D visualisation. All that is needed is to establish a co-ordinate system and any data can be transformed … and it can even have a time dimension!
https://www.facebook.com/MSPowerMap
It can do some visualisations that are just not possible with Visio, but I could see that Visio could be used to feed custom maps to Power Map with base layers and a co-ordinate system.
Cool custom maps : https://blogs.office.com/2014/10/08/6-cool-ways-use-custom-maps/
I will play some more with this soon….