Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide

An accessible fast paced introduction to all aspects of Power BI for new or aspiring BI professionals, data analysts, and data visualizers

Key Features

• Updated with the latest features in Power BI including Dataflow, AI insights, visuals and row level security
• Get faster and more intuitive data insights using Microsoft Power BI and its business intelligence capabilities
• Build accurate analytical models, reports, and dashboards

Book Description

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions.

You'll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You'll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you'll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques.

In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency.

This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented.

By the end of this Power BI book, you'll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.

What you will learn

• Connect to data sources using import and DirectQuery options
• Use Query Editor for data transformation and data cleansing processes, including writing M and R scripts and dataflows to do the same in the cloud
• Design optimized data models by designing relationships and DAX calculations
• Design effective reports with built-in and custom visuals
• Adopt Power BI Desktop and Service to implement row-level security
• Administer a Power BI cloud tenant for your organization
• Use built-in AI capabilities to enhance Power BI data transformation techniques
• Deploy your Power BI desktop files into the Power BI Report Server

Who this book is for

Aspiring business intelligence professionals who want to learn Power BI will find this book useful. If you have a basic understanding of BI concepts and want to learn how to apply them using Microsoft Power BI, this book is for you.