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A Behind the Scenes Tour: Thanksgiving with Power BI

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

During Thanksgiving week we shared with you a Power BI sample for turkey production and consumption. This week we wanted to take you behind the scenes and give you a glimpse into how we did it.

Especially nearing the final month for accepting submissions to the Power BI demo contest, this video is a great example of a short and sweet combination of how we used the features of Power BI to build this sample and the insights we obtained from the data. If you’re looking for some guidance for your contest submission, this is it. You can also check the current entries on the contest to get more ideas. 

The video in a nutshell

Discover: In Excel we used Power Query to find the data and prepare the USDA databases for our model. We gave a couple of examples on how we found the data through online search and how we transformed and included some calculated fields for the datasets downloaded from the government agency website.

Analyze: Once we had all the necessary tables, we used Power Pivot to build our model. We highlighted how the diagram view made it easy to connect our different data sources to create the final model of the visualization we shared with you. On top of that, since we needed to calculate new fields based on our related sources, we showed how we did that in the Power Pivot model.

Visualize: When the model was ready, we gave you an idea of how easy is to create a dashboard with Power View and make it look beautiful — it’s as simple as selecting the fields you want and choosing the type of chart you need. Then we talked a little bit about the Power Map tour you saw in the video from our last post.

Share and collaborate: Finally, we moved to the cloud. We uploaded the file to our Power BI site and explored it in our browser — same experience, same insights, but for everyone, anywhere.

We hope you enjoy the video and don’t forget to create your demo and submit it at www.powerbicontest.com!