Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Complete Reference

By : Devin Knight, Brian Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Manuel Quintana, Brett Powell
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Complete Reference

By: Devin Knight, Brian Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Manuel Quintana, Brett Powell

Overview of this book

Microsoft Power BI Complete Reference Guide gets you started with business intelligence by showing you how to install the Power BI toolset, design effective data models, and build basic dashboards and visualizations that make your data come to life. In this Learning Path, you will learn to create powerful interactive reports by visualizing your data and learn visualization styles, tips and tricks to bring your data to life. You will be able to administer your organization's Power BI environment to create and share dashboards. You will also be able to streamline deployment by implementing security and regular data refreshes. Next, you will delve deeper into the nuances of Power BI and handling projects. You will get acquainted with planning a Power BI project, development, and distribution of content, and deployment. You will learn to connect and extract data from various sources to create robust datasets, reports, and dashboards. Additionally, you will learn how to format reports and apply custom visuals, animation and analytics to further refine your data. By the end of this Learning Path, you will learn to implement the various Power BI tools such as on-premises gateway together along with staging and securely distributing content via apps. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide by Devin Knight et al. • Mastering Microsoft Power BI by Brett Powell
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Connecting to Sources and Transforming Data with M

This chapter follows up on the dataset planning process described in the previous chapter by implementing M queries in a new Power BI Desktop file to retrieve the required fact and dimension tables. Parameters and variables are used to access a set of SQL views reflecting the data warehouse tables inside a SQL Server database and the Annual Sales Plan data contained in an Excel workbook. Additional M queries are developed to support relationships between the sales plan and dimension tables and to promote greater usability and manageability of the dataset.

Three examples of implementing data transformations and logic within M queries, such as the creation of a dynamic customer history segment column, are included. Finally, tools for editing and managing M queries, such as extensions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, are reviewed. 

In this chapter, we will review the following topics:

  • Query design per dataset mode
  • Data sources...