They say a good magician never reveals his tricks. Luckily, I’m a rubbish magician and so (at the request of Jason Thomas and David Eldersveld) I can reveal the secret behind one of the magic tricks I used in my sessions at SQLBits and the PASS Summit last year: my mind-reading card trick. More specifically, this post will show you how I was able to find out which card my helper had picked from a deck and how I was able to make its name appear in Power Map. Alas the video of the hour-long SQLBits session isn’t available for some reason, but the video of the shortened version of the session I did at the BI Power Hour at the PASS Summit is available for purchase here along with other, much more useful content.
First of all, the mind-reading bit. I hate to admit it but it had nothing to do with this rather fetching hat – the Microsoft Brain Interface – modelled here by Matt Masson:
In fact I had some accomplices (Bob Duffy and Carmel Gunn at SQLBits, Matt Masson at PASS) who entered the name of the card into a text file stored in OneDrive when my helper showed it to the audience. I then used the technique Melissa Coates blogged about here to read the name from the text file using Power Query on my laptop.
Second, the harder problem of taking the name of the card and making it appear in Power Map. Again, I used the magic of Power Query. On an Excel worksheet I used 1s and blanks to represent each letter of the alphabet in its own 8×8 grid:
…and then I read this into Power Query, matched each 8×8 grid up to the letter it represented, split the name of the card into letters, put the two together and got a table containing a set of data points that, when plotted on a custom map in Power Map, could be read as text:
You can download a modified version of the workbook here which reads data from the worksheet instead of a text file and renders the text over a regular map in Power Map. Here’s an example of the output:
Sadly I’m even less of an artist than I am a magician, and I admit that the output could be prettier. David Eldersveld recently showed off a very impressive Power BI report that uses a scatter chart to display the Power BI logo (you can see the report live here):
I guess the logical next step would be to take my code, move it to Power BI, add a column with date values in and use the play axis on the scatter chart to display animated text or pictures. But, to be honest, that might be too geeky a project even for me.
