Learning Microsoft Power BI

Preface

I was a senior at Ball State University when one of my professors, Dr. James McClure, and I were discussing classic challenges to the perfectly competitive market model. We were having a back-and-forth, and throughout our entire discussion, I kept bringing all the critiques back to a single problem: asymmetric information. Asymmetric information is the condition in which one party knows more about the topic at hand than the other party, to the point where they can use that for some sort of advantage.

We live in a world in which Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and others know so much about you that they can try to figure out what you want before you know you even want it. However, you have access to that same information. In the information age, we don’t have an asymmetric information problem as much as we have an asymmetric comprehension problem. What we historically haven’t had is the ability to process data in the same way. Or at least, we didn’t until recently.

Tools that would allow you to aggregate information at scale were historically tools of organizations that could afford complicated investments into data platforms that the ordinary person could neither comprehend nor afford. However, today there exists a piece of software that puts one of, if not the most powerful analytics engines ever made into your hands with an initial investment cost of zero dollars and zero cents. We have never been more awash in data, and that data is more available to people like ...