Introduction to Power BI

This course is aimed at anyone who will be involved with designing, creating and publishing a Power BI Business Intelligence solution and will provide you with the foundation Power BI training that you need get started on your journey to powerful power BI reports and business Insights. The course covers the loading and transforming of source data, the building of a tabular data model that provides a collection of related tables of data offering common hierarchies and measures used in the day to day analytics of business data and performance, the creation of reports, the publishing of datasets and reports to PowerBI.com, the creation of Dashboards presenting key visualisations for Business insights, and the sharing of Dashboards and Reports to those that need them. Power BI employs the functionality of Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View behind the scenes so if you have used any of these add-ins from within Excel you may have met some Power BI features and tools already. This course is also suitable for those who intend to use the individual components as Excel Add Ins. Following on from this course is our Introduction to DAX course, but you may wish to consider some follow on workshops working with your own data and looking how your new Power BI skills can be applied in your own challenging environments.

Course Outline

Introduction To Power BI

• Microsoft Self-Service Business Intelligence

• Importing data

• Modelling Data

• Creating Dashboards & Reports

• Installing Power BI Desktop

• Creating your First Power BI Project

Discovering & Loading Data with Power BI Desktop

• Data Sources: Files, Databases, Azure, Web Pages, Other Sources

• Refreshing Data & Queries

Transforming Datasets

• Power BI Desktop Queries

• Transforming Source Data: Cleansing, De-duplicating, Merging, Deriving new Columns, Removing Rows and Columns, Transposing Columns, Unpivoting Columns, Filtering Rows

Data Cleansing

• Query editor context Menus

• Data Typing Columns

• Replacing Values

• Filling Down

• Using First Rows as Headers

• Grouping Records

Data Mashup

• Power BI Desktop View Ribbon

• Duplicating Columns

• Splitting Columns

• Merging Columns

• Creating Custom Columns

• Adding Index Columns

• Merging and Adding Data

• Aggregating Data on Merging

• Appending Data

• Un-pivoting & Pivoting Data

• Transposing Rows and Columns

• Removing Error and Blank Rows

• Duplicating Queries

• Managing The Transformation Process with Applie Steps

• Applying Changes to Queries

Creating a Data Model

• Data Modelling in the Power BI Desktop Environment

• The Power BI Desktop Data View

• How We Decide Whether to make our changes in the Data Model or Query

• The Modelling Ribbon

• Manipulating Tables

• Manipulating Columns

• Data Types

• Formatting

• Categorising

• Default Summarisation Function: Sum, Count, Max, Min, Average, etc

• Column Sort Orders

• Relationships

• Data View and Relationship View

Extending the Data Model with Calculated Columns

• Types of Calculations

• New Columns

• Naming Columns

• String Expressions

• Arithmetic Expressions

• Calculating Across Tables

• Refreshing Data

• Using DAX Functions

• Simple Logic: IF () Function

Adding Measures to the Data Model

• Basic Aggregations in Measures: Sum, Count, Max, Min, Average, etc

• Cross-Table Measures

• Advanced Aggregations: CALCULATE

• Filtering Data in Measures: Column Filters, ALL, ALLEXCEPT, ALLSELECTED, FILTER

• Ranking

Analysiing Data Over Time

• Simple Date Calculations

• Date & Time Formatting

• Calculating Age and Difference

• Adding Time Intelligence to a Data Model

• Date Tables

• Time Intelligence DAX Functions: TOTALMTD, TOTALQTD, TOTALYTD, PREVIOUSQUARTER, PREVIOUSMONTH, PREVIOUSYEAR, PARALLELPERIOD, DATEADD, DATEDIFF, DATESBETWEEN

• Data as a Ration Over Time

• Comparisons With Previous Periods

• Rolling Aggregations

Text-Based Visualisations

• Power BI Desktop Dashboards

• Switching to Report View

• Creating Tables

• Enhancing Tables: Totals, Formatting, Titles, Fonts, Colours, etc

• Creating a Matrix

• Row Matrix

• Column Matrix

• Creating Cards

• Switching Between Table Types

Charts in Power BI Desktop

• Creating Charts

• Basic Chart Modification

• Basic Chart Types: Line, Pie, Column, Bar

• Enhancing Charts

• Other Chart Types: Donut, Funnel, Stacked Column and Bar, Scatter, Bubble, Waterfall, Dual-Axis, Clustered

• Drill Down

Other Types of Visuals

• Maps

• Bing Maps

• Using Geographical Data Types

• Enhancing Maps

• Tree Maps

• Guages

• Additional Visuals: The Power BI Visuals Gallery

Filtering Data

• Visual-Level Filters

• Page Filters

• Report Filters

• Text Filters

• Numeric Filters

• Date Filters

Using Slicers

• Adding Slicers

• Applying Slicers

• Formatting Slicers

• Using Charts as Slicers

• Cross Chart Highlighting

• Charts as Filters

Enhancing Dashboards

• Adding Text Boxes

• Adding Hyperlinks

• Adding Images

• Adding Shapes

• Layering Visuals

PowerBI.com

• Publishing Reports to PowerBI.com

• Creating a Power BI Account

• Interacting With Reports in PowerBI.com

• Creating PowerBI.com Dashboards

• Adding Tiles to Dashboards

• Sharing Dashboards

• App Dashboards

• Creating New Reports in PowerBI.com

• PowerBI.com Gateways

• Ad-hoc and Scheduled Data Refresh