Playing in the Sandbox

The neat thing about any technology is that it's rarely a standalone tool. Technology, much like people, rarely completely plays alone. Power BI is an example of a technology that fits into this criterion.

For example, let's say we want to embed Power BI on a webpage. We can connect our webpage to the Power BI report by embedding it in this other webpage. This then takes us outside the Power BI service space in the cloud when we set up this embedded view.

Designing web applications come in many layers. The original mainframe computers with green screens were much easier to work with from the development side because they don't have many ways for the end user to interact with them. The advanced UI we see today on our computers, smartphones, and other devices are what makes it easier for us, as end users, to interact with what's on the screen. Unfortunately, though, they make it much harder to build these applications on the backend because there are more layers to them. Here's how these layers stack up on a high level:

1. HTML is the structure of the website: think of the tables, the banners, the images, and so on.
2. CSS is the styling. Think of the font, the colors, and how it's formatting on top of the HTML code.
3. JavaScript is the way in which we interact with a webpage on top of the HTML structure and the CSS styling. When we click on a link, what does it do? When we click okay when submitting a form, what are the next steps it takes?

Building applications with these languages is a time-intensive and energy-intensive endeavor. However, if you're curious about what this code looks like, right-click on any webpage (including this one), then choose Inspect from the dropdown menu. This opens a panel on the same screen where you can explore the elements, styling, and event listeners on a webpage. To write JavaScript code, check out an IDE (integrated development environment) like Visual Studio for example.

The Power BI Sandbox

Power BI lets us call APIs (within reason) from the Power Query Editor to get our data. We can also connect other applications to the Power BI API initiated from the Power BI service. One way we can play around with this is by using the sandbox environment, a topic covered in a recent video in the Power BI Weekly serial course.

Notice the interactions that the sandbox enables. The embedded Power BI report, as well as the styling, get set up through the HTML code and the CSS scripting. However, if we want to expand the space in which our Power BI report sits or choose a filter (among many other things), we automatically write and set up JavaScript that runs in this space.

More About JavaScript

If you want to learn more about JavaScript, check out fellow LinkedIn Learning instructor Morten Rand-Hendriksen's courses on this topic! Here's a recent course released in the library which also includes the neat feature of GitHub Codespaces to try out code without having to set up a JavaScript environment of your own.

I took the course below two years ago when I was first dipping my toes into the waters of JavaScript. Morten does a great job with analogies and explaining key topics of JavaScript so that we can apply them to our own work!

JavaScript isn't an easy language to pick up. I work mostly with data science languages (SQL, R, and Python), so I use JavaScript much less than I do those three. However, I've found that JavaScript is immensely helpful to know how to read. And to that end, I actually find it's a bit easier to read than other languages for some reason. I'm not sure if it's because of the curly braces and semicolon syntax, but either way, that's been my own experience for learning this language.

Coming Up

I know that probably everyone says this at this time of year, but I can't believe it's already December. I'm currently working on a time series modeling course for the LinkedIn Learning library. I'll also be continuing the Power BI Weekly series into the coming year! I'm very excited to continue to share weekly tips and tricks (like the Power BI sandbox discussed above) in the serial course that help others make Power BI more useful and applicable in their own work! Stay tuned for more to come!

-HW