HomeAuthor InterviewsInterview of Greg Deckler

Interview of Greg Deckler

Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?

Greg: Power BI.

Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?

Greg: Packt found me from reviewing the Power BI Community sites forums where I answer a lot of questions, blog and post entries to the Quick Measures Gallery.

Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?

Greg: Since this was a second edition, did not have to spend nearly the amount of time researching and prepping as normal. For the first edition, I probably spent a month or more creating and prepping the data and scenario for use in the book.

Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?

Greg: Just the same challenges as everyone else dealing with COVID-19!

Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?

Greg: Power BI has a bright future. The underlying technologies behind Power BI such as Power Query dataflows continue to become more integrated into other Microsoft technologies such as the Dataverse. Microsoft continues to lead the business intelligence space by just about every measure and I do not see any slow down in the pace of innovation and improvement of the product.

Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?

Greg: I think there are a few differentiators. This book’s core is the step-by-step guidance coupled with a lot of images to make things clear. These have been entirely redone to correspond with interface changes in the Desktop and Service. And instead of just learning different, disconnected features, the reader learns through a single, cohesive, real-world scenario where they progress from a blank page to a fully developed professional report. Another is the balance between learning the fundamentals and more advanced features such more complex DAX, goals, scorecards and deployment pipelines. Finally, I added additional chapters in the second edition that provide great context in terms of how to plan and execute business intelligence projects, how to deploy, govern, administer and adopt Power BI and even how to start a new career in business intelligence!

Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?

Greg: Power BI is a fantastic tool that can add a lot of business value to an organization. You can use this book as a springboard to advance your visibility in your organization or even start an entirely new career.

Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?

Greg: gregdeckler.com but I mostly post on the Power BI Community blog: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/bg-p/community_blog

Q. Can you share any blogs, websites, and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?

Greg: The Power BI Community site: https://community.powerbi.com SQL BI: https://www.sqlbi.com/ Pragati Jain: https://datavibe.co.uk/ Ed Hansberry: www.ehansalytics.com I have a long list of blog sites in the book!

Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?

Greg: I don’t really have any favorite tech journals. I keep myself up to date on tech through sheer force of will, there is just so much to learn and know you have to make it a priority to always push yourself forward to learn new things. I give myself projects to do, like reinvent all of the Excel functions in DAX or redo all of the time intelligence functions. My latest project is writing a WPF application as an external tool for Power BI.

Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?

Greg: This is my fourth title with Packt and it has been a great experience once again. I would definitely recommend aspiring authors work with Packt. Packt has a great process, guidelines and fantastic professionals that help guide you every step of the way. There is a wealth of experience and expertise that you can leverage within Packt to make your books a success.

Q. What is the one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?

Greg: Eliminate the blank page in front of you as quickly as possible. Look up some information on the Internet pertinent to the subject and copy and paste it to the page. Use that information as inspiration for putting your own thoughts down on “paper”. Or start by entering the chapter title and listing the major section headings. There’s something about staring at a blank page that is daunting but once you have some inspiration to work from and/or a structure the task becomes far easier.

Follow Greg on social sites:

Twitter: @gregdeckler

Power BI Community: @Greg_Deckler

GitHub: gdeckler

You can find Greg’s book on Amazon by following this link click.

Learn Power BI is available on Amazon.com



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