MVP Insights: Angela Henry Discusses Career Expertise, Making Power BI Reports ‘Pop’
Welcome to “MVP Insights,” a podcast that explores the universe, ideas, and opportunities of the brightest stars in the Microsoft business applications ecosystem.
In this episode, John Siefert is joined by Angela Henry, Principal Consultant, Fortified, Microsoft MVP. The two discuss Angela’s journey to becoming an MVP, how she overcame her toughest projects, and details of Angela’s session at Community Summit NA 2024.
This episode is sponsored by Community Summit North America, the largest independent gathering of the Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem, taking place Oct. 13-17, 2024, in San Antonio, Texas. Register today to connect with thousands of users across the Microsoft business applications ecosystem at the for user, by user event.
Key Takeaways:
- MVP overview: In college, Angela pursued a math degree with a minor in computer science. During that time, a friend requested her help to cover for a speaker at a User Group meeting. Despite her initial reluctance due to public speaker, Angela accepted and had success leading the session. This experience sparked her interest in community work and led her to get involved with “SQL Saturdays.” Angela began actively speaking at events in 2017 and was recognized for her excellent presentations, leading to her nomination and selection as an MVP in January 2018.
- Career expertise: At the start of her career, Angela was a programmer. She transitioned to database administration, specializing in SQL Server, and enjoyed it for 15 years. Eventually, Angela explored business intelligence (BI) where her combined experience in programming and database administration was beneficial in BI.
- Difficult projects: Angela describes one of her more challenging projects. A multinational client in the financial services industry involved the challenge of migrating from on-prem analysis service to Power BI. The client’s data volume was so large that it exceeded the capacities of a P5 in Power BI. Angela and her team worked with the business to prioritize essential data for the Power BI model, recognizing that not all historical data needed to be included. They maintained a complete data set in the warehouse backend but limited what was put into Power BI. This approach allowed them to move to the cloud with a P3 instead of a P5 and significantly reduce the size of a key table from over 30 billion records and 30-40 gigabytes to less than five gigabytes.
- Summit NA session: Angela shares details on her Community Summit NA 2024 session, “Make Your Power BI Reports Pop.”. She intends to emphasize the importance of making reports visually appealing and engaging in Power BI. She uses simple, out-of-the-box features to enhance reports, making them more user-friendly and app-like, rather than just presenting tables of numbers. Her goal is to create reports that not only provide information but also capture the user’s attention and are easy to navigate.
Stream the audio version of this episode here:
