The Defensible Decision
A Guide to AI-Assisted Business Analytics
The book is now available in paperback. Read it alongside this companion site for the chart gallery, chapter resources, datasets, prompts, and feedback that keep the practice current after publication.
This site complements the book The Defensible Decision: A Guide to AI-Assisted Business Analytics. The book teaches the principles of analytical visualization first, then the discipline of directing AI to apply those principles. Some material lives better online than in print — vendor surfaces that change every six to twelve weeks, interactive chart galleries, errata that accumulate after the book is bound. That material lives here.
Start Here — Book Reader
If you are reading chapter-by-chapter, begin with companion chapter pages and then pull datasets and prompts as needed.
Go to Chapter Resources →Start Here — Practice Track
If you want hands-on practice first, download a dataset and pair it with the matching Appendix E starter BRD.
Open Teaching Datasets →Share Feedback
Tell us about an issue, a difficult concept, or an improvement opportunity in the book, workbook, or companion site.
Open Feedback →Chart Gallery
An interactive Flint/Vega reference of 41 chart cards organized by analytical intent. Each card pairs a worked visual with a Big Idea, use guidance, and a better option where comparison form matters. It is the current companion to the chart catalog in Appendix D.
Open the Gallery →Chapter Resources
One companion page per chapter. Cited works, documentation pointers, and worked-example assets that complement the book without aging out of date with it.
Browse Chapters →Teaching Datasets
CloudRevenue, M365Marketing, SupportInsights, EnterpriseGovernance. Synthetic data sized for real practice across the 14 chapters — with the kinds of imperfections real data has, documented per dataset.
Open Datasets →Power BI, Fabric, and Copilot
Use Power BI, Fabric, and Copilot as a practical environment for applying the book's transferable analytical discipline. Start with setup guidance, a video path, or the platform reference catalog.
Explore Power BI →Prompt Library
The eleven canonical prompts from Appendix B paired with Chapters 8 through 14, each pinned to a specific Copilot surface with a verification date. Read as a pattern catalog, not a script.
Open Prompts →Online Resources
Living index of Power BI, Copilot for Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and data-visualization resources — first-party documentation, third-party practitioner sites, community tooling, and academic venues. This is the home for what was Appendix D in earlier drafts.
Browse Resources →Feedback
Share a correction, a point of confusion, or an improvement opportunity. Location-specific feedback helps us prioritize updates and future editions.
Share Feedback →Death by Pie Chart
The book's most-cited anti-pattern gets its comeuppance. A looping arcade title-slide animation where a hungry hero chomps pie charts through a maze of office cubicles — each cubicle showing the honest line chart it should have been. Self-contained; opens standalone for full-screen presenting.
Open the Animation →About the book
The Defensible Decision is a guide for MBA-level analysts and mid-career professionals learning to work with AI-generated charts and dashboards. The book argues that visualization principles must be internalized by hand before AI direction can be done well — the principles are what let an analyst judge AI output. Part I builds the discipline by hand; Part II layers Dialog Engineering and the CSAR loop on top of the principles. Power BI Copilot is the working tool throughout.
The book is the source of the discipline. This site is the source of whatever the book cannot keep current in print.