I am delighted that Carmel Gunn and Bob Duffy, from Prodata SQL Centre of Excellence, have recorded their incredible voyage into the root causes of the Irish Economic Crisis Visualised in Microsoft Power BI. It is a breathtaking 40-min story of how anyone, given some perseverance and easy to use tools, could study publicly available data to find out what was happening in their own economy, and perhaps to help spot problems before it was too late.

Some of their findings may surprise you—like which countries “helped” Ireland into this problem and why. Some other answers are better known, like where the money was wasted, but one thing is clear: the era of empowering people to do their own, advanced analytics is here to stay for good. It is both amazing, and even slightly frightening how much real knowledge this approach can uncover. I bet that those of you who read this now will be showing your children, sooner than later, how to interpret data for a school project using tools like Power BI or Excel—so watch this fascinating video, even if just to know how to help the next generation be better at being aware of what is happening around them.

While this video is entirely free! for everyone to watch, we also offer the data models and all of the visualisations, as two Excel workbooks containing the Power Pivot data model, one of which is even optimised for use with Power BI natural language query Q&A feature. Those are available to Full Access Members.

Enjoy!

Rafal