Power BI for Practitioners
Build Honest Dashboards from Real South Asian Data
A practical course for building dashboards from the survey data you already use. Each of the eight modules covers one part of the workflow and ends with a lab you do yourself in Power BI. The examples are NFHS, ASER and World Bank data, and the course is straight about where the free version stops and what live sharing costs.
8 Modules with Labs
NFHS · ASER · World Bank
What's Free, What Isn't
DPDP-Aware
What this course covers
The companion Data Visualisation course lays out a tool ladder, from spreadsheets through Datawrapper and Flourish to Power BI and Tableau, then code. This course is that rung in full: everything you need to take Power BI from install to a shared dashboard, with the development-sector cases the generic tutorials skip.
Varna and Vandana Soni alternate as your coaches throughout the course. Every module carries learning objectives, worked teaching excerpts, two coach callouts, a lab, a common-mistakes list, an applied challenge with a worked answer, five self-check questions, and resources.
Most Power BI tutorials use corporate sales data. Development work needs different examples — survey factsheets, district indicators, programme spend.
The mechanics are the same whoever you work for. What's usually missing for development work is the part the tutorials skip: cleaning a messy NFHS factsheet, knowing when a map of counts misleads, what it costs to share a live report, and what the DPDP Act lets you publish.
Real regional data
Labs use National Family Health Survey, ASER education data, and World Bank indicators. You build the dashboards you would actually need.
What's free, what costs
Building is free. We say plainly where the paid wall sits, what live sharing costs per person, and which free routes carry hidden privacy risk.
Privacy and the law
India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 shapes what you may publish. We build that floor into the workflow, not bolt it on at the end.
Eight modules, each with a lab
Work through them in order; each one builds on the last. Keep a dataset of your own open alongside the labs.
Interactive toolsTwo calculators to use as you plan
These run entirely in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere. Use the first when you budget a rollout, the second whenever you are unsure how to build a number.
Licence cost calculator
How many people need to view or build a live shared report in a browser? (PDF and .pbix handoff are free and do not count here.)
Measure or calculated column?
Measure or calculated column?Answer two questions about the number you want to build.
1. Does the value change when a user clicks a slicer or filter?
2. Do you want to slice or group BY this value (use it as a category)?
Course assessmentHow you know you have it
Each module ends with five self-check questions, 40 in all, plus an applied challenge with a worked answer. They are formative: immediate feedback, no score kept. You have understood the course when you can do the following without looking back.
Readiness checklist- Install Power BI Desktop for free and explain to a Mac user their realistic options
- Load a messy survey CSV with the right encoding and reshape it from wide to long
- Build a star schema and explain its grain in one sentence
- Write a rate as a measure with DIVIDE, and a comparison with CALCULATE
- Choose a chart from the question and avoid the count-map and truncated-axis traps
- Assemble a one-page dashboard with drill-through and a source line
- Pick a sharing route, price it, and keep personal data off anything published
If any line is shaky, the module that covers it is one click away in the sidebar. The real assessment is the capstone below.
Capstone projectPoint the whole course at your own data
The capstone applies the course to your own data. Take everything from Modules 2 to 7 and build a dashboard a colleague could use on Monday. Allow three to four sittings; the milestones below mirror how the wider ImpactMojo capstones are run.
The brief
Choose one question your programme needs answered every month or quarter. Build a Power BI report that answers it from real data, at district or block aggregate level. Deliverables: the .pbix, a one-page summary exported to PDF, and a short note stating the data source and round, the refresh cadence, and the sharing decision with its cost.
How it is judged
| Criterion | What a weak version looks like | What a strong version looks like |
|---|---|---|
| A real, named question | ‘A dashboard about health’ | ‘Which blocks are below the district stunting average this round, and by how much?’ |
| Data preparation | Edits done by hand, unrecorded | Power Query steps recorded, reshaped to long, types set, keys trimmed |
| Model | One flat table | A star with a named grain, a date table, clean one-to-many relationships |
| Measures | Numbers typed into formulas | Named measures using DIVIDE; comparisons via CALCULATE |
| Visuals | Count map, truncated axis, eight-slice pie | Rate map, zero-based bars, sorted, labelled, with alt text |
| Honesty & privacy | Identifiable data, no source line | Aggregates only, source and round stated, sharing route costed |
Going furtherBring a capstone to the ImpactMojo dojos or coaching for feedback. For a strong addition, add a World Bank cross-country page via Get Data > Web alongside your national programme view.
Where to get real data to practise on
A starting shelf of free, public datasets that load cleanly into Power BI with the techniques in this course. Always state the source and the year on any report built from them, and prefer aggregates over identifiable records.
| Source | What it holds | Good for | How to load |
|---|---|---|---|
| NFHS-5 (IIPS / MoHFW) | Health, nutrition, fertility for 707 districts, 2019-21 | District health and nutrition dashboards (the running case here) | CSV or Excel from the factsheet portal |
| ASER (Pratham) | Rural children's reading and arithmetic levels | Education-outcome cleaning and trend work | CSV; expect a title row and wide layout |
| UDISE+ (Min. of Education) | School-level education statistics | Schooling infrastructure and enrolment views | CSV / Excel exports |
| World Bank Open Data | Cross-country development indicators | Comparison pages and benchmarking | Get Data > Web (API or CSV) |
| data.gov.in | Wide range of Indian government datasets | Programme and scheme dashboards | CSV; often needs UTF-8 and reshaping |
| Census of India | Population, housing, demographics | Denominators for rates, dimension tables | Excel / CSV tables |
Part of a wider open network
Power BI sits alongside the other ImpactMojo flagships and tools. These pair naturally with what you have learned.
Who built this
Varna
Co-founder, ImpactMojo
A development economist and lawyer who has spent years turning messy programme data into things people can act on. One of your two coaches through the course.
Vandana Soni
Co-founder, ImpactMojo
Brings the practitioner's eye to every dashboard: who reads it, what decision it serves, what could go wrong. One of your two coaches through the course.
ImpactMojo is a free, open-access development education platform for South Asian practitioners, sponsored by PinPoint Ventures. Everything here is free and forkable.