I’ve been thinking about this for a while and, after discussing it with a couple of others who are passionate about Power BI… I’m pleased to announce that we have created a new Power BI User Group in Vancouver, BC!
What is the Power BI User Group about?
The goals of this user group are fairly simple:
We plan to meet monthly, and have a presentation on using Power BI technologies. (This could be Power BI Desktop, Excel, Power Query or Power Pivot.) Whatever it the presentation, and no matter how focused it is on a specific area, it will ultimately be relevant to the over-arching Power BI path of taking your data from raw form to a published dashboard. This user group is basically dedicated to bringing you content to inspire you and make you an expert in the Power BI technologies in your company.
Our secondary goal is to be a networking group for Power BI professionals. If you’ve ever felt like the only one in your company that actually understands what you do… well that’s why we are here. To give you someone to swap stories with, get ideas and maybe even change your career goals. 🙂
Oh… and did I mention that another goal we have is to keep these events free for attendees?
How can you get involved?
There’s actually a few ways you can get involved with us…
If you’re looking to attend…
Then it’s simple. Sign up at our Meetup site. Then attend a meeting. That’s it. No cost, no fuss. All we ask is that you register in advance and attend if you say you’re coming. (We have limited space in our venue right now, only able to seat about 25 people.)
If you’d like to sponsor the event…
We are looking for a sponsor to cover the cost of pizza and soft drinks for our user group attendees. It shouldn’t be much, and we’d be happy to tell everyone how awesome your company is. If you’d like to come on board as a sponsor, please get in touch with me via my contact form.
If you’d like to speak…
Got something cool that you’ve built using the Power BI technology stack? Would you like to talk about how to actually get Power BI traction in a corporate environment? Got some other relevant topic that you’re passionate about? Come to an event and chat with us or get in touch through the contact form. One of our key goals is to make sure we have good variety in our speakers!
When is the first meeting?
Great question! We’re going to be meeting Thursday, July 14 at 5:30pm in downtown Vancouver. I’ll be presenting on how to build this self updating Power BI dashboard which is originally sourced from PDF files.
8 thoughts on “New Vancouver Power BI User Group”
Great start Ken, I'm sure your group will be very popular soon 🙂
Thanks Reza!
Hi. Do you plan to have an online meetings as well? Or at least to share knowledge online? Unfortunately I am European so attending physically is impossible ?
Hi Juraj,
Not at this time, no. But I'm curious if you've checked to see if there is a Power BI usergroup in your area. We're so new we're not on this list yet, but there might be something closer to home for you: http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Power-BI-User-Groups/ct-p/Groups
Ken, thanks a lot for info. There are some groups relative near by, so I'll check with them!
Would love to see a blog post here on using PDF files as the source for a Power BI solution. Have only seen manual approaches for extracting data from PDFs.
Cheers
Phil
Hey Phil,
Unfortunately, the approach is still manual. I use AbleToExtract Pro to extract the data. That's not going to work for large scale solutions, and also has it's issues with consistency as well. In the case of my solution, I only needed to do about a file a month, so it's workable.
Ah, thanks for the clarification Ken. You had me very excited for a while. Wish I still lived in Vancouver to be able to be involved with the UG. Cheers, Phil.