Every year at Pragmatic Works some coworkers, including consultants, marketing staff, support team members, software development staff and project management, partake in a company fantasy football league. And with the recent release of the new Power BI Desktop, I thought what better way is there to prepare to completely annihilate my coworkers and friends in an imaginary nonsensical game than by creating some nifty Power BI dashboards based on last years player stats as recorded by Yahoo! Sports. So I thought I’d walk you through some of the steps I followed to leverage the Yahoo! Sports NFL player stats page as a data source and some of the query transformations I applied to prepare the data for reporting.
If you’re worked in the wide and diverse field of information technology for almost any amount of time, it probably hasn’t taken you long to discover that the one thing constant about IT is that the technologies and strategies involved change faster than you can learn them. And if you work in business intelligence like I do, you don’t have to look very far at all to see change. The Microsoft Power BI team rolls out a software update every month! If I want to stay learned up on the technology, I have to really be on top of things.
In the July 2015 update for Power BI Desktop there were a load of improvements to the tool including new data sources, new transformations, direct querying of SSAS Tabular Models, new Data and Relationship view, publishing directly to your Power BI site and some new visualization types.
Last night I finished editing and posting my video walkthrough of Microsoft’s new Power BI Desktop tool. This tool is awesome! If you’re looking for an end to end analytics tool that will allow you to consume all types of data sources, mash it up, and then report on it in one single place, this tool can do that.
So give my video walkthrough a watch to get ramped up on Power BI Desktop and leave a comment down below if you enjoyed and learned something from the video!
If PowerPivot, Power Query, and Power View had a baby (don’t ask how) that baby would be called Power BI Desktop Designer. Yesterday the Power BI Desktop Designer was released for general availability, which I promptly downloaded last night at 11:30 PM EST and started playing with. Even as my wife turned out the light and begged me to go to sleep, I persisted! I was too excited. So here’s my first run through (I call it run through because it was late and I didn’t spend a ton of time looking at every little thing).
Continue reading #PowerBI Fantasy Football Player Stats Dashboards for Download 
