For those who weren’t aware, SumProduct's very own Tim Heng spent the last few days in Seattle at the Data Insights Summit hosted by Microsoft. While that’s given us the opportunity to provide constructive feedback to Microsoft program managers, it’s also given attendees the opportunity to check out some of the cool new things that are happening with Power BI (and Power Query by association).

Now not everyone who wanted to go could go. However, Microsoft has released videos from the event sessions here. So why on earth did we spend the dough on sending Tim over there other than to fuel his allergies..?

Nonetheless, Tim recommends the following sessions in particular:

• Opening: this is where they introduced a number of the cool features coming out in Power BI over the next few months
• Data visualisation keynote: A good explanation about dashboarding and how it’s important to send the right message
• Pretty General high level sessions on how to benefit from using Power BI and Excel, how they work together, how Power BI is useful for reporting and so on. More for people who haven’t really used Power BI yet, although the “Whirlwind Tour of Power BI and What’s New” is good to see what cool new features are available
• How to use DAX / Power Pivot, how to use M and Power Query, lots of good technical advice here
• Final keynote: Not sure if all of our readers are across Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner (authors of the book Freakonomics) but they were the closing speakers at the conference, and have great stories about how to think about data.

If you have some down time, it really is worthwhile watching a few of these sessions. These are hosted by Microsoft staff and some fellow MVPs for the most part, so they’re all people who are incredibly knowledgeable about their stuff.

You can check out Tim's full report on the Data Insights summit in the July newsletter. If you haven't already subscribed, climb aboard by filling in the form at the foot of any SumProduct web page.