AdviceTech Podcast #4 – Microsoft Power BI – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the X Y advice tech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And this week, we’re gonna deep dive into Power BI that was how to say Power BI. But joining me here today is an author, a fashionista, a data analyst and a fellow tech geek. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Robyna may. be well welcome.

Robyna May
Thanks so much, Peita. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

Peita Diamantidis
Fabulous. I’m really I’m really excited of what we can dive into here. But before we do, let’s just sort of get to know you a little better through your use of technology. What’s your most used emoji? Do you use emojis?

Robyna May
I do use emoji. And my phone tells me my most used one is the thumbs up. And I have a feeling that’s the slightly passive aggressive. Yep, got it. And con vote don’t have time to keep going.

Peita Diamantidis
Closely followed by the letter K. I reckon the letter Yeah, okay.

Robyna May
Okay, okay, we have a bit of KK going on at work as well, like slightly more friendly.

Peita Diamantidis
I’m gonna remember that one, I love it. And how about so smartphones, they, you know, they wear this all the time. Now we’ve got our own personal computers. If you had to get rid of everything on your smartphone, and you just were left with three apps, what would you keep?

Robyna May
So I probably check my social media more than anything else, I’d probably be quite happy to take that off, I’m not going to say that I’m gonna go for my most useful apps. So I use an app called snip, S N double AIP. What that does is it allows you to schedule all your bills. So we’ll actually scan your emails to figure out what bills you’ve got coming in there. It’ll put it in the app, it’ll tell you when it’s due how much and then you can connect it to pay by a credit card or via BPAY. So you can just let it do the work for you. And just set and forget, that’s a really useful app that I love.

Peita Diamantidis
What the listeners would have picked up as my head went straight down, and I wrote it down as describe that. Fabulous, what else have you got what other goodies

Robyna May
this one’s a little bit more boring. But I do like cielo Park, which just allows you to have your parking just taken care of. So you just rather than trying to find where on earth, they’ve put the parking meter halfway up the street, you just put in the code of where you’re parked. And then it will just dock you the parking that you’re actually there for rather than having to say Oh, I might be here for $8 worth. So that’s another hit is and then I also like the ritual app, which is a app that allows you to order food and coffee etc etc in advance so your order and pay and then you go pick it up. I like I like saving time and money. I can

Peita Diamantidis
tell. super organized. There’s all those apps. I love it. I love it. Oh, there’s such good tips. I mean, we’ve I feel like we should just finish like we’ve already got everything done done. Well, let’s dive into that, shall we? For the listener Robina is actually a consultant you work within velata consulting in the business works primarily with law firms implementing things like Power BI is that right?

Robyna May
Yeah, so our primary business is around practice management systems and document management systems and employee renting and supporting those. But we do then want to be able to have other infrastructure around it to support law firms. One of those things that we utilize is Power BI in the business intelligence space. So law firms will need, often will need reporting that’s a bit more than what they can get in their practice management systems. And so we utilize Power BI to create custom reports from that data, but other data as well. So Power BI is a pretty powerful business intelligence tool that allows you to take data from lots of different places. And that’s what we help law firms with.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. And look, as I said to you, before we actually hit record on the pod, I actually like the idea of us talking through your lessons from love law firms, because I think they’re far more similar to advice firms than people would think, you know, there’s heavy on the paperwork, you know, heavy client focused, and probably not taking advantage of the data they already have, or, or the way they could utilize it. So I think there’s probably a lot of overlap there. In terms of what we could learn. So Power BI sits in that sort of business data reporting dashboarding space, is that a fair sort of, you know, in terms of categorizing it, for everybody?

Robyna May
Yeah, so it’s a business intelligence tool, which is lightly different from just a custom reporting tool. So the idea of business intelligence, I like to look at it this way, if you think about running a report from say, your practice management system, or or any kind of managed, so your aim, or whatever it is, has to be, whatever it is, tends to be fairly row based, you tend to have to kind of really analyze that data before you can surface anything interesting about it. Whereas a business intelligence tool tries to go the other way, so that you’re using interactive visuals so that you can see those points of interest up top, and then you can dive in and see what might be causing that. So it’s really great once it’s all made for people that aren’t so keen on data, just want to be able to see really quickly, oh, okay, you know, my dad has or a bit of a problem, or, or there’s a there’s a goal, we’re not hitting, what should we do about that? And then going down and understanding the data that’s sitting behind it, yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And so the, the visual nature of this is a core part of it, it’s that dashboard, the thing that’s really I mean, it’s like the dial on your car. So you can really tell instantly, I’m speeding or I’m not, it’s something that’s really has a quick message, which I think for anybody, you know, running, running or owning out small and medium sized business, then those things are hard to get. And invariably, we get that information too late, it’s always sort of later looking back as opposed to live when you’re in the business. So I think, you know, business intelligence is that next level up, where you’re sort of tweaking things on the fly, and learning as it’s happening, as opposed to looking back when you do your accounts, and going, oh, you know, we should have responded to that differently. So, to me that the dynamic nature that is exciting. So in terms of what people might otherwise be using, what are the things that they’re trying, you know, if they don’t have Power BI, or are unaware of it, what are they currently using as an alternative?

Robyna May
So I tend to think of Power BI, a little bit like Excel on steroids, it just takes Excel to this next level. So a lot of people will use Excel, and then you know, struggle with V lookups. Or if you’re getting a little bit more exciting, you might be into Power Query. But it’s still a little bit of a clunky tool to try and combine different data sets. And then the visualizations within Excel are a bit more limited compared to what you can do with Power BI. Excel is probably the thing that most people would use to combine their data if they don’t have access to a business intelligence tool. And then of course, there are lots of other business intelligence tools on the market. People might know Google Analytics, yep. Hello. We’ve chosen to focus on Microsoft’s Power BI, because it just fits really neatly within the Microsoft stack. And most of our clients are, you know, use Microsoft Perfect.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. So then it sounds like the primary problem that Power BI is trying to solve, then is that accessible and really quickly absorbable information. So as opposed to the raw data itself, which is often where people try and start, and then it takes forever to pull together? It’s about making that really accessible and choosing the data you want. So I’m sort of picturing that as the dashboard of you only see the things you want to see. Is that fair?

Robyna May
Yes, that’s exactly right. And Power BI does have the capability to take data from different sources. So for, say, a law firm, you definitely want information from your practice management system. But maybe you also want information from your Google Analytics. And you want to know where people are coming to from. Maybe you also want to connect to Xero, because you do a bunch of your accounting in Xero. Maybe you’ve got a CRM system, maybe you use HubSpot, and you want to bring in data from that as well. So as long as you’ve got some way of accessing that data, however, I couldn’t bring it all together in one spot, then you just need to figure out how it all kind of matches together. And that’s probably where the more technical side other things is, but once you’ve done that, you can start to look at things really creatively.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And we’ll come back to that data matching thing, because that I’m a bit curious about that. Because clearly, there’s multiple types and locations of data and how do you tidy that? And what do you do with it? So we’ll come back to that. But I do think, in terms of then, it’s targeted at initially, my first thought was, well, clearly, Power BI is targeted at the practice manager slash owner, like it’s at that high level, yes. In terms of business intelligence, but what about, you know, that secondary user, what about the individual in a practice? Is it something that you can then tailor for somebody in a role that’s, you know, more fulfilling something more functional? Is there value that Power BI can bring to them?

Robyna May
Yes, absolutely. So what our law firms will do is say they’ve got a set of metrics that the firm needs to hopefully arrive at, there’ll be a firm wide dashboard that might show that and that might be more information than say, a lawyer might need. Or it might be more sensitive than what you might want just a lawyer to see. But then a lawyer might have their own individual dashboard, which is tracking their progress, or their progress against their KPIs, whether that be billable hours, or how that data is going, or you know what they’re investing in business development or precedent development, all those other things that aren’t necessarily fee generating, but do build the business. And that’s the other nice thing about Power BI, because you can bring in data from different sorts of data sets, the traditional metrics can be augmented by those other things that we all know are really important to building any business, not just law firms.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it’s, um, look, it’s so interesting, because I mean, the one thing about, you know, financial advisors, we love a good graph. So the, we don’t need to be convinced to have a screen full of, you know, any visual representation to that saints, if anything, we probably love them a bit too much. But I think what we, what we probably haven’t taken further is that bringing together all of those multiple sources, you know, bringing together all those multiple places that we can get data, and there’s so many for us that I can really see, you know, across multiple software’s even product providers, I mean, we’ve got, you know, connections to super platforms that like all sorts of things that over time, you could probably start to get some really useful insights that would, you know, help either, like you say, an individual member of the team, or the sort of business as a whole. To that end, is there a tip a particular type of business, or the way they run it that this works really well for? Or conversely, one where it’s like, this is never going to work? Like is the cloud got to be a thing? Or what? How does p Power BI really implement? Well,

Robyna May
so it does, it does implement Well, in a cloud based environment, it is a cloud based product. And there’s a number of different things that allow Power BI to connect to data sets that are on prem as well. And the other thing that so when we think about data sets, it can get really, really complex, or it can be really simple. Okay, so for instance, you can take an Excel spreadsheet, and you can publish that up to Power BI and create that as a data source using Power Query, you can even upload things like PDF documents and be able to extract the data from the PDF. So even if you’re getting a bunch of more paper based kind of information together, you can feed that through to Power BI and start connecting things together and playing with it. So you don’t necessarily have to invest in a whole bunch of API’s and a whole bunch of technical stuff. You can you can do that at what might be considered a less technical level. Yeah. Okay.

Peita Diamantidis
And I guess that’s yes. For somebody that’s a bit data focused, like I am, my background is, you know, actuarial and, and financial analysts, all that sort of stuff, then I would probably get a little obsessed about the extent to which the data is matching, when in fact, what it sounds like is you’re looking for themes or key messages out of the data. And the fact that that set doesn’t perfectly match this set isn’t as important as the, you know, the overarching, is it going up? Is it going down? Is there a flag sort of messaging? So?

Robyna May
Yeah, and look, I think one of the things that we often do come across, is that trust in the data, because lawyers, would you believe it, really in particular about such things as well. So they will often be looking to balance back their reporting. So yes, I think it’s good to look at your data and understand that if it’s, you know, $3 out, trend is probably still the trend. Yeah. But what we also find is helpful. And this is something to think about if you get into Power BI and creating these reports, is just to be really transparent about how you are calculating things so that people start building that trust in that data. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
that’s fair enough. And is there any, you know, somebody’s thinking along these lines? Is there any sort of insider tips or things you’d suggest they do before even going down this path? Is there any tidying or, or you know, ducks in a row, they can get that that would help them really take advantage of something like Power BI?

Robyna May
So there’s probably a couple of different things within that question. So you Do you want to make sure that your data sources are as clean as possible, if you’re wanting to connect them together, you’re probably going to have to do some cleanup in any case. So whether or not you do that at the data source level, or whether or not you do that within the tools within Power BI, so like Excel Power BI has power query behind it, which enables you to take those data sources and apply some cleanup. Okay. And power power query is probably one of the most powerful tools in the Microsoft world that not everybody knows about. So if you’re at all interested in Excel, please look up Power Query, your mind will be blown. Have a look

Peita Diamantidis
at going down again, writing that down.

Robyna May
You can say goodbye to VLOOKUP just use power query. So you, you’ll need to do your data cleanup in that regard. I think with anything, it’s worth stepping back and understanding why you’re doing what you’re trying to achieve. So if you’re wanting to say to yourself, Okay, I need this nice clean way of presenting things in a visual way to my clients, think about what that’s going to look like, think about the data sources that are going to feed into that, and then go from there and start utilizing the tools to build that that out. I think, very often we get excited about new tools and what to do with them. But I think at the end of the day, we always need to be solving a business problem. So that’s where I would absolutely start, then maybe clean up your data, and then have a ball with all the cool graphs and things. But you got to do your homework before you get to the graph.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. And I sort of see that in, even in our, you know, our team, right across tech, they understand the value of data of utilizing fields that we’ve decided to use, say in a CRM or anything like that. But even then, they may still use each field differently. And so having the rules of how we record things, the names we always consistently use, or whatever it is, makes them the value of something like Power BI even more valuable, because there’s probably less, or it’s that that and that we mean here, you know, it’s that sort of tie up, where somebody uses one word, and somebody else is used to like it’s just, you know, it can get really messy. So is that sort of, it’s almost your own glossary or consistent way that you refer to things in the practice can make a huge difference on bedding for this type of thing.

Robyna May
You just Yeah, absolutely. There’s a bit of a saying kind of in the data world about garbage in garbage out. So but treasure in treasure out as well. If you keep things clean and useful, that is what you’ll be able to utilize at the other end.

Peita Diamantidis
And I guess the other thing I’d say too, like these projects can just seem unfathomably big, you know, like, it’s all you want me to tidy my data. And it really can be overwhelming. What we do sometimes with some of these things is we go yes, we want to end up down there in this wonderful position, we’re going to take six months to transition there. And as everybody interacts with a certain field, whatever it is, we’ll tidy it organically. And we only do it that way. Because most a most of us can’t just close the doors, and spend every minute if we’re all team of tidying something or getting it right. So I find sometimes, depending on what the efforts required is, you know, that organic change and thinking, Alright, we’ve got it done. Now we’re ready to do, you know, whatever we wanted to do with that, you know, clean data can be a good way to go. Sometimes you want to do it all in a hit. But sometimes it’s like, no, no, no, just work towards it. You know, get there. And then

Robyna May
I think the nice thing about Power BI is once you’ve kind of got your way around it, it’s quite a quick development tool. So in that situation where you are trying to encourage people to, you know, clean up the data, hey, let’s be consistent with our approach on how we’re recording things. If you can kind of show people because this is what we’re going to get to at the end, if you can keep things clean, you’re gonna get these amazing visuals that are going to be super helpful. If you get this right can kind of help people along that journey.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, fabulous. And I think something you just mentioned, you use the word client in terms of visualizations. And so I had mentally just been applying this across the business and even maybe a team member. But is there ways to use this with client data in the way you represent things to them as well?

Robyna May
Yeah, absolutely. We’re actually working with an accountant at the moment. So sometimes we do do cross paths. So this accountant works heavily with with law firms. And what he’s looking to do is to create a bit of a dashboard and pull certain bits of information together. And then because he’s working with lots of different clients also kind of use that as a benchmark as well to see where people are kind of up to. So you can definitely do that. You can definitely take bits of data and you can secure it via Power BI so little bit like what we talked talked about with the Fiona or the lawyer only seeing their data in the same way you could apply that security to a to a client so that they could just see their information.

Peita Diamantidis
Oh, fantastic. Okay, let’s probably got some people just cogitating there because it’s, once again the data we have on Cloud science comes from so many different places, and it is very even even the best of you know, tailored financial advice solutions often will struggle to get all of that in one place. So, you know, if we need to be the hub of all of that, then maybe there is some particular visualizations that some of the listeners could come up with using Power BI. Now, something I did want to just sort of touch on, we’ve been talking about data. And I think when people hear that they hear spreadsheets, definitely numbers in spreadsheets, and maybe fields like in C, or it looks that they think that sort of stuff. I’m guessing, and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but another type of data could be activity. So it could be task completed, or activities is that something else that Power BI can be used to sort of go, you know, how are people going? How much are they getting done? What are they? What’s their capacity?

Robyna May
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we actually do a fair amount of task based reporting in when what we offer our clients. So a lot of areas of law are very heavily task based. So if you think of maybe like convenience things, and something that people can get their heads around being task based fairly quickly. And then you can measure the time that it’s taking between certain points within that process, whether or not there’s anything that you need to speed up whether or not there’s a point at which, you know, even if think of a more like an inquiry process, is there a point in which clients become disengaged? Is there an amount of time? I mean, you know, if you let your imagination run loose with data, there is like, you could just measure everything.

Peita Diamantidis
And just spend all your time just looking at all?

Robyna May
Well, I will say, I will say, No, I did say that I like to save time and money. One thing that I love about Power BI is it does focus people’s attention on the actual interesting things about the data, right? Rather than spending all of that time trying to collate it. And by the time that you’ve, you know, gone through, and you’ve done your V lookups. And you’ve put all your Excel spreadsheets together, and you’ve created a bunch of graphs, who then has time to look at it? What is this telling me? What is this telling me about my client? What is this telling me about my business? What should I be doing with this information? That that can kind of not even be a part of someone’s job if they’re spending all this time playing around with getting the data, right. So and

Peita Diamantidis
it is, I mean, in small business, we probably if anything, we’re not doing enough of the reporting, probably. But in larger businesses, I’ve got a good friend that works in a large corporate, and she’s on a cycle every month, where, you know, the whole team is down for a week, because they’re pulling together the executive reporting. And every time you know, she tells me and she’s sort of, you know, they drop off the radar, because it’s just flat out, like, how can this not be automated? I don’t understand our human Hey, yeah, I’m manually doing.

Robyna May
Yeah, it’s definitely in that automation space. It actually a little bit of a segue. But it actually ties in and integrates quite nicely with Microsoft Power. Automate, is another part of the power platform. That’s probably some something you could talk about to somebody power automate. But it’s another fabulous tool that tries to address some of those things. You’ve just talked about just people spending time on stuff that could be automated, and then they can use their brilliant creative minds and more brilliant, creative ways. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
And look, I think the thing with this sort of information, and particularly, you know, time taken or, or delays, I think it can be hard because the team can take that somewhat personally, you know, I’ve I know, they’re just measuring me and, you know, I’m just a workability. And, and whereas, in fact, what you’re trying to identify as bottlenecks, like what’s the thing that holds you up, and you only get that, if you can see the transition, you know, if you’re measuring, that’s the only way you’re going to get it. So, to me, that’s why I sort of suggested to the teams, I just want to pick out those bottlenecks. What are the things we can do to sort of break that such that, like you say, either the client gets disengaged, which happens, right? If it’s, if something doesn’t keep its momentum up, then they lose interest, and they’re not, you know, maybe returning a phone call as quickly as they call it, or whatever occurs? So I think, you know, that type of insight is really fascinating. And could be really beneficial. I think, for most businesses. Is there anything that you think, you know, there might be some listeners that are already into Power BI, and they’re experimenting and you’ve got some dashboards happening? Is there any sort of features or anything that you see that most just don’t take advantage of, you know, that just don’t go deep enough.

Robyna May
So Microsoft is continually updating this product, I often go into Power BI services, and just like, Oh, that looks different. What have they have they had an end today? So I think a big part of it is just staying on top of those changes. And I find guy with a cube who’s a Power BI YouTuber, like really useful, he’s got short quick will generally cover off those updates and things like that. Nothing beats just having a little bit of a play in there. And what I’m noticing is that they are increasingly trying to tighten the integration between Power BI and the office 365 products. So something that’s recently come in is in PowerPoint, there’s now some more native integration with Power BI so that you can pull your live reports directly into a PowerPoint deck. So you can imagine if you’re presenting to the, to the broader team, and that’s how things are going, that you just have this interactive graph, which you can just share with people that’s connected to your live data. Oh, yeah, the possibilities are endless. just exploring all those integrations is something that people can really leverage. So I do think I mean, everyone, everyone’s busy, I think every COVID Didn’t make people less busy, make people much more busy. And I think if you are now in that space, where you’re utilizing Power BI, just making that space to play, because I do think that’s where the gold is found is just trying to be a bit more creative with it, trying to look at different ways of using it, just so that people kind of understand how it works. So Power BI in terms of how you develop your reports is developed using a tool called Power BI Desktop, that’s a free tool, you can download that and start using it. So in the back end, it looks a little bit like Excel. And then in the front end, it looks like a custom reporting tool. But like Excel, or any of those other tools, it’s the tool that you would edit it in, but it’s not necessarily the tool that you would use to distribute it to people to have a look at. Okay, so the tool that you use to distribute it to have a look at is called Power BI services. That is a paid, this is what Microsoft does, it shows you the value of its product. Real good your taste, and then the real real value, well, we have to make money.

Peita Diamantidis
It’s adding value, that’s all good.

Robyna May
Exactly. So you publish your reports, then up to Power BI services, and that’s where you can then give people access to it. So in both in Power BI services, and in Power BI Desktop, those products are continually being added to by Microsoft, and in Power BI services, in particular, have just added some scorecards and some different metrics and different ways of looking at things. And one of the areas they seem particularly interested in is more on that data, storytelling side of things. Yeah, that you can sort of just ask it an unstructured question, and it’s going to give you some feedback, which is it’s interesting and fun to play with. Sometimes it doesn’t quite hit the mark. But yeah, it’s there to play with and have a look at and in both of those sets of things, Power BI Desktop and Power BI services, I’d recommend just continue to play.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And look, I think data visualization is something that I think, you know, particularly in finance, what we’ll look when we say that probably most advisors or people their industry, I think, oh, graph lines, maybe a crazy pie chart, like that’s as far as I go. Whereas really great data visualization is more like the is it the times are one of the one of the papers in the US when they do that, you know, it’s the bubbles, or it’s the, the moving the thing that moves over time. Like there’s some really clever and interactive, engaging ways of visualizing data that I’m betting that’s where Power BI is trying to go. Like it’s trying to make it something that is accessible to anybody, not just, you know, nerds like me that love XY graphs, you know, we want something that’s that’s also anchors the message, you know, it really instantly gives somebody exactly what they need to know without being able to interpret, you know, in a strange graph language.

Robyna May
Yeah, exactly. And I’ve seen a nice Venn diagram that has sort of, you’ve got data, you’ve got your visualizations, but then you also have narrative. And it’s in that narrative piece that you’re really applying those more interesting kinds of visualizations in that context that people can just understand straight away without, you know, having to refer back to Statistics. Exactly. And there’s a great website called inflammation is I think it’s called inflammation is beautiful.

Peita Diamantidis
Oh, yes, yes, yes. I know. Exactly. Yes, yes. Yes. And

Robyna May
that is amazing. Just Just incredible visualizations there. And if you’re ever feeling a little bit on an eye board, have you XY graphs, your pie graphs, you can go in there and just have your mind blown. Yeah. And

Peita Diamantidis
it’s, it’s because what you like the storytelling of the narrative is actually what you’re trying to communicate, you’re not actually trying to communicate the data. You know, and that’s a tough thing, I think, in finance for us to let go off, I think we think it’s about the data. And it’s not that the data is what’s underlying it. The data is sort of like what, what research scientists have like that. They don’t share all of that when when they announce something in the paper or whatever. It’s, what’s the outcome, you know, what’s the discovery? And so the more we can move towards that, I think that’s really exciting. You know, and to sort of view Power BI, maybe you start with getting those insights just for your business or just for your team, but to sort of just really open your mind to the possibilities there. I think that’s that’s where we we’ll probably need to, to move well, I’m probably lawyers too. I mean, there’s, there’s a whole lot there, changing the mindset. And the way we sort of approach what we do, and how we deliver it. It’s really exciting is there and I’m betting, they’re just constantly developing that. So that’s just something that iterates over time power.

Robyna May
Yeah. And there’s a very lovely community around Power BI as well. And you can see, Power BI will come with a set of fairly standard visuals. So you’ve got your XY graphs, you’ve got your pie graphs, got a few more exciting ones, like waterfall graphs, etc, etc. There’s some some cool mapping, if you’ve got some regional stuff going on as well, so that you can see those hotspots in different regions. But then there is a whole library of data visuals that other people have developed and very kindly added to the Microsoft library that you can then pick from as well and use those in your reports, you have to be a little bit careful. It’s a bit like downloading random apps on your mobile phone, you might want to be a little bit judicious about the ones you choose. But it does open up just a whole other spectrum of visualizations

Peita Diamantidis
to utilize, and I’m betting then there’s probably the even further, you know, level where you could probably paste. Like, if you had a particular thing in mind, you could probably pay somebody to really come up with that so that they could, you know, tailor the visuals. Yes, yeah,

Robyna May
yep. Yep. Yeah. That’s quite, that’s quite sophisticated level skills. That’s the next level up, so be able to actually create the data visualizations themselves.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay, awesome. Is there anything you feel we’ve missed anything that, you know, the listeners should know, or be wary of anything to watch out for?

Robyna May
I think you can get a little bit excited. And you can make your dashboards potentially a little more complex than they need to be. Probably just always thinking about the end user and who your audience is, and talked a bit about storytelling, think about your audience. Yeah, trying to keep things just nice and clean. And there’s lots of examples of that. So I think, sometimes I find that quite helpful, just have a bit of a Google search, just have a look at what other people have done in that space to try and not get too overboard with a million grams, which might look pretty, but someone’s gonna look at it and go, I really don’t know what on earth is going on here. I do think like anything, Power BI does have a little bit of a hump to get over to first start learning it. So persevere, there’s an awful lot of information online, just keep going with it start simply. So what I would advise people to do is download Power BI Desktop, then maybe have a look for a tutorial that has a data set alongside it so that you can then play along, follow along and play with that and just understand how that works. And just don’t expect to be able to run before you can crawl. And if it is something you want to explore. And then you kind of do hit some roadblocks. There are obviously lots of different Power BI consultants and professionals out there that you can touch base with we work obviously fairly specifically within the legal industry of a lot of consulting. I imagine there might be people who work in the financial

Peita Diamantidis
sector, I’m sure there are I think the difference for me these days, when I think back when I was I mean, this is a long time ago, when I was a financial analyst, and we were doing the hardcore Excel stuff. You had to buy those massive manuals, that was the only place you could get insights about how to use these things. Like there were these horrible sort of encyclopedia like books that you had to flick through, you know, whereas these days, find a great YouTube channel, and you’re sorted. Once you find that one that resonates, you’ll just go there all the time. And invariably, often those people who host those, if you reached out with a specific query that you couldn’t get an answer on, they probably answered on the show, you know, so, yeah. So people are so generous, they’re really keen to help and there is such an overlap with what the things we do need to learn if your domain so what we’re trying to learn and so it’ll be there. I’m confident that you know, if just get a bit creative with Google and do that search,

Robyna May
yeah. Searching daily for you know, different sorts of things to do with Power BI. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
exactly. Exactly. All right. Advice explores. So if you’d like to find out more about Power BI and maybe velata, then the website link will be in the episode show notes. But please also will include rubina’s LinkedIn details. So you know, maybe reach out maybe, you know, check in and connect with her if you’ve got questions or maybe join a Power BI group. Exactly, then you might have some suggestions, but you know, thank you so much for joining us. We’ve been around I sort of love that I you know, this actuary early trained financial advice. Financial Analyst just got schooled on the use of data. I think that’s fantastic.

Robyna May
Well, I do get very excited about that. So I hope people get a little bit excited about it, too.

Peita Diamantidis
This has been fantastic. I have no doubt everybody’s got got some great value. So thank you very much.

Robyna May
Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Peita Diamantidis
So are you a current user of Power BI, I feel like that’s something we should have to declare now, in financial advisor using this, because you know, we should all be using this. Maybe you agree or disagree, you know, with Rabindra, my chat on Power BI, please share your insights on the XY community platform, I’d love personally to hear your take maybe any tips and great insights you’ve got from using the tool, and perhaps, you know, some heads up or suggestions for your fellow advisors, or people in the industry that that are just starting out, you know, what you discovered, as you started using the tool, in terms of my thoughts in I guess, financial advice, we really operate across so many platforms, software’s, you know, we gather an awful lot of data. And, you know, what’s clear, is that we’re simply not making sense of what the underlying themes and messages that are available in that data and what exists, you know, we’re, we’re sort of not trying to dig out the patterns, and therefore, the opportunities for improvement, we’re sort of just letting that data sort of sit there and percolate. You know, the old saying is, you know, what gets measured gets managed, I would propose that advice explorers like us see, it is what gets measured, gets upgraded. Yes. So, you know, for a long time, there’s been, I think, some industry expectations that, say, product providers might be where great data insights can live, you know, aside from software providers, maybe they, the product providers should be giving us great data, right insight. So maybe it should be dealer groups, you know, but as I think about it, you know, having chatted to Robina, the financial advice, business is at the heart of it all. So, you know, we get data from both sides, we get it from our clients, we get it from our suppliers and partners. So if we can harness that data, then maybe this is where the real evolution of financial advice gets sparked, you know, and that’s really exciting. The other thought I had was, if you are going to go down this path, and be looking for those sort of business intelligence insights, then I would suggest just picking maybe three things you want to know initially, you know, three bits of insight or three themes you want to be able to pick up on or patterns, don’t go overboard, like Robina said, I, you know, I completely agree with you there. Just pick three, practice, get it working, get it humming, and then over time your workout. Either you start massaging that and the thing that you were measuring improves, you no longer feel a need to focus on it. And then you choose a new thing. Or you can start to add a few more as you get used to this sort of dashboard concept. But don’t overcook it to have a massive dashboard with all these things. Because to be frank, you won’t use it in the end. Now, that was a pretty strategy, heavy topic, right? I was pretty full on. So I thought for today’s curiosity corner, I would bring to your attention, an app that I’ve come across that you know, tweaked my interest, but in fact is a whole lot of fun as well. So for this week’s curiosity corner, I’d love you to check out Habitica Ha, be it ICA and you can find that@habido.com. Now their tagline is gamify your life. And they’ve basically built a free habit building and productivity app that sort of treats your real life like a game. So think the games like mist or any of those games, Dungeons and Dragons, these sort of things when you weren’t progress and points and, and rewards and collected, you know, gold, that sort of thing. So Habitica has in game rewards and punishments, even to motivate you, and a strong social network to inspire you to make change to build new habits. And so it can help you achieve your goals to say being healthy or, or more productive, or just generally happy and more upbeat. You can check off tasks to level up your avatar, you can unlock in game features like battle armor, and mysterious pets and magic skills. You can even go on quests. You can use it anytime you’re trying to form a new habit. And I’d say give it a try. You know, once you get used to it. I’m sort of wondering and I haven’t gone down this path yet. But I’m sort of wondering if there’s a new habit that you could perhaps start a quest on that you could do with some clients even, you know, is there something that you could all join together, motivate each other and make some progress on you know, really, I’ll just encourage you to sort of keep an open mind as we try out these out of left field tools as you just never know when you might come across one that just becomes a game changer for you for your business or for your client offer. So check it out and let me know what you think. Okie dokie. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like to speak your next event to brief your audience on how they too can become bionic advisors being the best of human and technology, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn forward slash Peter M D. That’s PT ITAM D. Otherwise I look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember, advice explores Stay curious