The Clearly Podcast

Send a text Our highly anticipated Part Two to our Season Two Grand Finale on Machine Learning! This week we discuss how to decide if machine learning is the right choice for you; Do you have enough data? Are you prepared to be transparent about how you analyse customer data? Will your data create an AI monster?!  Next week, in the last of our mini-series, we will look at how you can use Machine L...

Send a text As a big finale to Season 2, we thought we'd bring you a mini sub-series on possibly the biggest buzz word of the year: Machine Learning. This week, we look at what machine learning is, and where you might have come across it in your day to day life.  We go on to discuss why business might want to use Machine Learning and the sorts of problems it can solve. Next week we will go on...

Send a text This week, we talk to Haseet Sanghrajka from City Dynamics about Microsoft Dynamics and Power BI. Well, that was what we were meant to talk about. It’s difficult to approach this subject without starting with the range of reporting options used by Dynamics customers. And it is a broad range from our old friend Excel, to Jet Reports and FRX, Power BI and many more in between. Haseet tak...

Send a text In this week's Clearly Podcast our friend Jon Styles makes a second appearance to talk about the current job market. In season 1, episode 11 "So You Want To Be a Power BI Consultant " , we talked about how to get skilled and approach the job market as a Power BI consultant. This episode continued that theme, albeit with a heavy focus on the current job market and what th...

Send a text This week we talk about data lakes.  Essentially, a data lake is a mechanism to store large quantities of (typically) raw data, both structured and unstructured, bringing together data from across an organisation. In a "traditional" data warehouse solution,  we tend to think about an "Extract, Transform and Load " process, extracting the data from source, transformi...

Send a text This week we discuss Azure Synapse Analytics This is, in essence, a cloud-based distributed database system.  It is aimed at larger scale analytics applications rather than transactional processing. The approach taken by Synapse to processing queries is to break them down and process parts of a query across different computing nodes.  The result sets are returned to a control node wher...

Send a text This week we go deep into Dataflows in Power BI. Dataflows are a method of building reusable content in the Power BI service that other users can use to help build other models. By using Power Query in the cloud, you’re able to perform transformations on one or many entities, storing those transformations as a cloud-based service. When you come to build or extend a model, the transform...

Send a text In this episode we talk about how we work with social media to enhance our professional careers. Most of the conversation is focused on Linkedin. To bring expertise to the conversation we were joined by Linkedin instructor and regular contributor, Helen Wall.  In this episode we cover: Ideas on how to get started creating content Our views on the best way to write your content Interact...

Send a text If you’re after a clickbaity title - this is the one for you (our podcasts with “Excel” in the title generally get more downloads). But, Excel and Power BI continue to be BFF’s for many of our users and as Microsoft develop more functionality that binds them together, that case will only get stronger. We can get purist about data structures so when the term “Excel as a database” is see...

Send a text Power Apps and other low code/no code platforms are often seen as a quick and easy solution to allow users to solve their own problems.  But is it that simple? What is the place for Power Apps, and if you decide to start a Power Apps project, how should you go about it? This week, we discuss how to approach a Power Apps project, why you should take it seriously, and why you need to thi...

Send a text Documentation is often neglected in many IT projects.  This week, we talk about why it is so important, and the risks involved if you don't do it. Some of the most fundamental things you need to document are: Passwords - and do it securely in a password vault Data dictionary so everyone knows how measures and KPIs are defined Configuration - so there is a clear understanding of wh...

Send a text Possibly a sensitive subject this week - low code development. To start with some context, we love low code development and are working on low code development projects, mainly through Power Apps.  We also see the marketing of low code applications and want to put forward our experience that low code is still a software development project with all of the challenges and intricacies tha...

Send a text Due to some technical issues, episode 4 is currently delayed.  Please watch this space and we will be uploading as soon as we can

Send a text This week we talk about the benefits of training your users in the early stages of an implementation project. We address why you may choose to do this and the benefits.  The traditional approach is based on a overloading users at the end of a project and generally leaving them to it. This approach has merit as memories fade over time - for some of us sooner rather than later! When you...

Send a text This week we talk about Power BI in the context of the wider Power Platform, by which we mean Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse -  the oft forgotten data store underlying so many elements of the Power Platform ecosystem. You can download Power BI Desktop from here . If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group...

Send a text This week we discuss the current state of management reporting and how it has moved on over the past decade or so. The world has moved on from flat, static reports in SQL Reporting Services and self-service reporting is becoming easier, but what about the perception of self service?  We often see that senior executives see self service as difficult and time-consuming, which with modern...

Send a text Welcome back to the Clearly Podcast, Season 2. In this episode we discuss what we have learnt from starting the podcast and talk about the topics we want to cover. In season 2, we will be spreading our wings into some of the broader areas of the Azure data platform, the impact of low-code and no-code platforms on software development, and what machine learning to mean to your business....

Send a text In this episode, we discuss our experiences of helping customers to migrate from Excel to Power BI. We talk frequently about how much Excel we see being used for data storage, manipulation and visualization when we start working with new clients. Furthermore, we talk extensively about the risks of proliferation of those spreadsheets, especially when they're replicated and changed...

Send a text This week we take a look at Power BI Report Server - the on-premise way to deploy Power BI reports. We consider when to use it and when not to, the limitations, and the costs. In general though, the default position should probably be to use the cloud service as Report Server will always lag behind in terms of features, and comes with bigger cost overheads since it needs to be deployed...

Send a text OK, it isn't quite yet - we still have to wait until April 2 for the GA release, but we do have a release date and price. Premium per user offers many of the premium features, licensed on a user by user basis. The main features it opens up are: Paginated reports (so we can now more easily centralise all business reporting) Increased refresh rate (so we can have nearer real time da...

Send a text We all have different communities we rely on. When working in technology those communities can become essential to our development and understanding of what we do. Whether that's getting help from a forum or meeting fellow like-minded professionals to share experiences and help each other when facing a specific challenge, communities are an important part of our daily lives. In th...

Send a text This week we talk about Application Lifecycle Management . It is important to remember that BI projects, like all software projects, should be considered in a cycle, rather than a linear process.  That is to say that the deployed report (or application) should provide a base for iteration. Most organisations are good at managing the environments to promote code from development to rele...

Send a text This week we talk about colour.  Colour is generally a central element of branding, but we must also think about accessibility and the emotional response colour generates.  Red is frequently associated with stop or bad, whereas green with good or go.  Similarly, we may say we feel blue when we're a bit down.  At the same time, we need ensure our choice of colours are accessible to...

Send a text This week we talk to special guest, Reza Rad, about governance.  If you have read any of the previous podcast descriptions, you will probably be familiar with Reza's work.  If you're not aware of Reza yet, you should fix that as he is one of the leading experts in the world in Power BI. Today, we cover all aspects of data and BI governance, from data sources through to output...

Send a text The capabilities of business intelligence tools have changed over the past 15 years. In the past a specialist or IT function would build and deliver reports. Modern tools such as Power BI now have the capability for users to create and edit their own reports and we see many users taking advantage of that development and devolving report creation across the organisation. While this is a...