The first time I opened Power BI I had no idea what I was doing. I was an education data intern at the International Rescue Committee, and my supervisor had asked me to build three reports. One to give teachers a snapshot of the clients they were serving. One to give supervisors a view of how each teacher was performing across their caseload. And one to show funders how their investment was translating into real outcomes for clients moving through English proficiency levels.
I said yes and then spent nearly a week watching tutorials.
I figured it out eventually. I learned just enough about relationships and measures to get the reports across the finish line. But I was building blind. I did not know what a user story was. I had never sketched out a data schema before opening the tool. I leaned on measures for things that should have been calculated before the data ever touched Power BI. It worked, but looking back I can see every seam.
So when Power BI came up in our third week at The Data School, I was happy to work with something I was familiar with. The interface, the model view, the logic of connecting tables. It was all there waiting for me. What was different was that this time I actually understood what I was looking at.
The concepts we had spent three weeks building in Tableau, fact tables, dimension tables, the difference between joins, relationships, and blends, all of it transferred. Not perfectly, Power BI has its own quirks and I am far from an expert. But the struggles shifted. At IRC my question was “how do I show the relationship between these two things.” Now my question is “which visual best communicates this connection.” That is a different kind of problem, and honestly, a better one to have.
What stuck with me most is how much planning matters before you ever open the tool. At IRC I treated Power BI as the starting point. Now I know it is closer to the finish line. The real work happens before that, in understanding the data, the audience, and the question you are actually trying to answer.
I wish I could go back to that internship with what I know now. I think those three reports would look very different. But then again, ask me the same thing in four months and I will probably say exactly that all over again.