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Don't just watch cat videos!

17/3/2020

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The unprecendented situation we face at the moment means that for many people, life is going to be much quieter for a couple of weeks. 

It's really tempting to watch cat videos or binge watch your favourite TV shows until your brain is fuzzy, but you'll probably feel guilty for wasting the opportunity to accomplish something more meaningful if you do that and nothing more.I really like the quote on the right because it echoes what we are trying to achieve with our courses, and that is to help our learners on the journey to self-improvement.

So get out of bed, get dressed and take advantage of this time you have to do something that you can be proud of.
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Maybe go for a run, call some friends you haven't spoken to in a while, clear out your old clothes for charity or sharpen up your skills.  And Udemy is the ideal platform for this with a wide range of topics you could upskill yourself on. 

To make upskilling yourself even easier, we have discounted our entire course range for the next 30 days with discounts of over 75% across the board.  Feel free to share this post with friends or colleagues who might be stuck with little to do. 

Just click the link to the course(s) of your choice and take advantage of this "BEAT_COVID19" offer.  Remember that you get a money back guarantee on any of our courses, and lifetime access so you can complete the course at your leisure.
Excel Courses (Discounted to between $12.99 and $13.99)
  • Excel Master Class - Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts
  • Excel Master Class-Power Pivot - Data Model and DAX Formulas
  • Excel Master Class-Power Query-Consume and Transform Data
  • Excel Interactive Dashboards and Data Analysis
  • Tables and Formulas with Excel
Power BI Courses (Discounted to between $13.99 and $16.99)
  • Power BI Master Class - Dashboards and Power BI Service
  • Power BI Master Class - Data Modeling and DAX Formulas
  • Power BI Master Class - Query Editor
  • Powerful Reports and Dashboards with Microsoft Power BI
Google Data Studio Courses (Discounted to between $12.99 and $13.99)
  • Data Analysis with Google Sheets Pivot Tables and Charts
  • Data Analysis and Dashboards with Google Data Studio
  • Google Analytics Reports and Dashboards with Data Studio
Data Analysis Courses (Discounted to $12.99)
  • Complete Introduction to Methods of Data Analysis
  • Complete Introduction to Business Data Analysis


Until next time - keep safe!
Ian and Scott
* Brian Tracy is an American-Canadian motivational speaker and author of several self-improvement books.
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Coronavirus Power BI Visualisation

6/3/2020

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Below is our Power BI visualisation on the Covid-19 coronavirus.  For more on the background regarding how we put this together, please see our previous blog post.

To interact with the visualisation, please consider clicking on the expand to full view icon on the bottom right hand corner below the visualisation. 

You can click on any of the countries in the table to filter for just that country.  There are also 2 filters at the top for "Rest of the world" or "China".  You can also click for specific regions like Europe or Americas etc. 

To clear the filter, either click on white space or click the clear filter icon on the top left hand corner. 
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Tracking a virus

3/3/2020

1 Comment

 
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An accurate recreation of what the coronavirus would look like
The current topic of conversation in many households and places of work is the coronavirus, or more correctly, Covid-19. 

Having studied biochemistry at university and also having an interest in epidemiology, this has definitely been fascinating to me.  A few days ago, I convinced Ian to do some work to create some visualisations based on real data, so as to show the impact the disease has had. 

The first issue that we had to solve was a way to find data that was reliable.  There is lots of data floating around but much of it is incomplete, or questionable.  As anyone who has worked on projects like this will know, getting clean data is more than half the battle.  After digging around the internet for a while and looking at various sources, we elected to use the daily situational reports issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO).  We felt that this organisation would have the necessary authority to provide data that was of a satisfactory level of accuracy.
What we have found though is that the data WHO provide does have some anomalies.  For example, we found cases where the total number of deceased in some countries would drop which is literally a miracle.  Digging into these, we found that most of the anomalies have an explanation of some sort. (eg Some deaths were incorrectly attributed to Covid-19 and this was later corrected.)  As a result, we decided that a few anomalies found in the inevitable chaos that dealing with a rapidly spreading disease introduces was acceptable. 

Once we found a source of data we were happy with, the next problem was getting this into a usable format.  The daily situational reports from WHO are published as PDF documents.  We had to take these and somehow get them into a data format.  This involved converting the PDF to Microsoft Word format and then copying the data from Word to Microsoft Excel. 

However, we still had more to do.  The way the situation reports gave data was not ideal.  For example, the number of cases and new cases were given in one field with the new cases shown as a bracketed number next to the total cases.  We needed to split out the new cases from the total cases and have these as 2 separate fields.
A final issue was changes in terms of the format of the data.  As the situation has developed, the format of the daily WHO reports has evolved.  This has necessitated a change in terms of how we extract the data into the final usable format.  Furthermore, we found situations where the naming of countries varied - usually something small like having an extra space or something similarly minor but nonetheless an issue for analysis purposes.  Fortunately, Excel has some simple to use tools for doing all this without complicated formulas or manual intervention. 
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We now have an automated process where we simply past the data from the daily situation reports, and refresh our Excel data source.  This process takes around 5 minutes which is manageable. 

Having found a way to get solid data in a usable format, we were able to build a visualisation using Power BI.  We can now update our visualisation with the new data on a daily basis and it's available for public consumption.  We published the dashboard to the Power BI server for access by anyone who wants to view it.  We've published the actual visualisation in it's own dedicated blog post click HERE to see it.  Our plan is to keep this updated as new data comes in. 
We hope you find this interesting. 

That's all for now...
Scott (and big thanks to Ian for all his hard work in making this visualisation happen!)
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