Using Special School District Reporting Power BI
- William Johnson
Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.
Requesting support for Power BI
Power BI allows one to connect to and visualize any data using the unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI) that’s easy to use and helps you gain deeper data insight. Power BI requires collaboration with Technology Services to design and structure your dashboard.
If you have any questions, you may submit a service ticket by emailing technologyservices@ssdmo.org, visit the SSD Help Center at https://jira.ssdmo.org or call the Service Desk at 314.989.8686.
Accessing Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a multi-device platform. There are three ways to access Power BI reports at SSD.
Power BI may be accessed through the web application, Special School District Reporting, at https://bi.ssdmo.org/. Sign in with your SSD username, SSDCO\username, and password. This web application gives you access to district reports such as ESI, Phoenix, Student Services, etc...
Using the dashboard
Power Bi provides you immersive data visualization and gives the user many options to drill down and parse the data. The sections below will give some examples of what one can do with a Power BI dashboard. Power BI dashboards add filters to your data. When a dashboard is designed the developer and business owner will decide on which filters make sense for the data. Once the filters are decided upon, you can narrow down the visualizations quickly by selecting one or more filters.
Drop-down Filters
Multiple selections: Hold down the CTRL or Command for Mac, key to select more than one item at a time.
Clear selections: Drop-down filters also allow you to return to the original state without any filtering, hover over the section and click the Clear selections button.
Focus mode: is not helpful on a drop-down filter. Use the drop-down filter to filter your graphs and then use focus mode on the graphs.
More options:
Export data as a .csv file you may open in Excel.
Show data in a full screen format
Spotlight the data by dimming the other items on the screen, making this one stand out. this is good when displaying data in a meeting.
Sort the drop-down list in ascending or descending order
Visual level filters
Filters Menu: On the far right of the screen is a filters menu. this menu will automatically populate as you make selections on your graphs and drill down. you can change filters and depending on what you have added, you may be able to remove filters.
Visual selections: Click on and section of a graph and the related graphs will drill down automatically. This is very powerful and has the potential to be used for any purposes.
Multiple selections: Hold down the CTRL or Command for Mac, key to select more than section of the graph at a time.
Focus mode: Click on the button to expand the graph in full screen.
More options:
Export data as a .csv file you may open in Excel.
Show data in a full screen with a summary pivot table
Spotlight the data by dimming the other items on the screen, making this one stand out. this is good when displaying data in a meeting.
Sort the drop-down list in ascending or descending order
For any visual graph right-click a section to display the following:
See records allows you to see the data that is summarized in the visual
Show data displays a visual in full screen with a summary pivot table
Include narrows the visual to show one section
Exclude allows you to remove sections of the visual, so you may focus on what you need to see.
If you use Include or exclude, you will need to use the Filters menu to remove those filters in order to return to the default visual. If you have any issue with a filter not being removed, refresh your browser page to return to the default.
Drill down options: for certain visuals and data sets you have options to drill up or down. This dynamically displays your data quickly on the fly. Hover over the visual and use the Drill Up, Drill Down, Go to next leval and Expand a level.
See records
Using the dashboard and having the visuals setup with Technology Services is in most cases what you need from the data. However, if you desire to see the exact fields that these visuals are pulling from, See records is where you want to go.
Right-click on any section of a visual and select, See records.
On the new screen you will be able to view the columns and rows of data.
You may also export this data to a .csv file by clicking on the More options button and selecting Export data.