24 Wins During the 24 Hours of PASS, Business Analytics Edition

Questions and Answers to the #24HOP Challenge

Thanks to all who attended the 24 Hours of Pass: Business Analytics Edition last week and for your participation in the 24 Hours of Pass Challenge, held on Twitter via @MicrosoftBI. The sessions were chock full of information, and they gave participants a sneak peek at the top notch content that will be delivered at the upcoming PASS Business Analytics Conference this April in Chicago, Illinois. And, that’s not all -- top tweet-speed Challenge participants won some great prizes as well for being the first to correctly answer a session-related question during 24 rounds of competition.

If you missed any of the 24 Hours of PASS preview sessions, it’s still not too late to take advantage of this fantastic content. You can view the sessions in their entirety on the PASS Business Analytics Conference website. You can also check out this list of #24Hop Challenge questions below that were tweeted during the competition, complete with answers!

Be sure to follow @MicrosoftBI on Twitter and like Microsoft Business Intelligence on Facebook for more opportunities to win some great swag!

Power Pivot for Excel 2013 in Action by Alberto Ferrari

Q: How do you deploy and share a Power Pivot model with your workgroup?
A: SharePoint

Q: Which DAX function is needed to compute the number of buying customers?
A: DISTINCTCOUNT

Putting the Business into Business Analytics, by Jessica Moss

Q: What is Microsoft's self-service business intelligence tool?
A: (Any one of the following) Power Pivot, Power View, Excel

Q: What are two of the six steps in the business analytics process?
A: (Any two of the following) Define metrics, get the data, distribute information, analyze information, change the business, track impact

Big Data on the Microsoft Platform, by Andrew Brust

Q: What 2 operating systems does HDInsight run on?
A: Windows Server and Windows Azure

Q: Name two consumers compatible with Microsoft’s Hive ODBC?
A: (Any two of the following) Excel, PowerPivot, SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular Mode, SQL Server Reporting Services, ADO.net, ODBC Client provider, LINQ

Why? Where? Spatial Analysis in Excel 2013, by Peter Myers

Q: Which tool allows preparing tours of spatial data?
A: GeoFlow

Q: What is the name of the process that translates text data to spatial coordinates?
A: Geocoding

Finding Rare Needles in the Haystack, by Paul Bradley

Q: When doing predictive modeling, what is “unbalanced data”?
A: Unbalanced data is when one class you're trying to predict occurs infrequently relative to other classes in the data.

Q: Can a #SQLServer / SSAS solution be created to address the challenges with "unbalanced data"?
A: Yes. The problem can be addressed by parameter tuning, sampling, or specifying different costs for prediction errors.

Ensuring Compliance of Patient Data, by Denny Lee

Q: What's the average gzip compression of healthcare audit logs?
A: 20x

Q: According to McKinsey, what is the potential annual value of big data to healthcare?
A: $300 billion

Dashboard Design Dos and Don’ts, by Stacia Misner

Q: What is the best type of visualization for comparing several categories over time?
A: Line chart

Q: Which type of dashboard is useful for exploring root causes?
A: Analytic dashboard

What is Big Data? By Mark Whitehorn

Q: What are the three V’s?
A: Volume, variety, velocity.

Q: Do we treat big data as atomic or non-atomic?
A: Non-atomic

Marketing Forecasting with Excel, by Wayne Winston

Q: What are the two most commonly used demand curves?
A: Linear curve, power curve

Q: Why is the effect of advertising on sales harder to determine than the effect of a price change?
A: The effects of advertising are lagged.

Visualizing Data with Power View, by Sean Boon

Q: Which airline gets you in the air the fastest?
A: Hawaiian Airlines

Q: How many carriers are operating in the U.S. as of 2012?
A: 90

Analyzing Data with Power View, by Jen Stirrup

Q: Which British nurse saved lives with data visualization messages?
A: Florence Nightingale

Q: Which diagram did Edward Tufte call possibly "the best statistical graphic ever drawn"?
A: Napoleon's March by Minard

From Data to Insight: Views from Microsoft Finance Director Marc Reguera, by Marc Reguera

Q: Why did the cost per mile go down?
A: The cost per mile decreased because we increased the mix of tickets purchased at least 21 days before the trip.

Q: What drove the increase in volume of trips in the airfare demo?
A: The increase was driven by an increase in the external portion, which are trips to customers.