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

Data sources


Data source connectivity is one of the strengths of Power BI, due to the vast list of standard data source connectors included in Power BI Desktop, in addition, to support for Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Object Linking and Embedding, Database (OLE DB) connections. The breadth of data connectivity options is further bolstered by the ability for developers to create custom Power BI data connectors for a specific application, service, or data source. Custom data connectors, the data retrieval processes created for all data sources for Power BI, and other Microsoft applications are developed with the M language.

Power BI's data connectors are consistently extended and improved with each monthly release of Power BI Desktop. New data sources are commonly added as a preview or beta release feature and previous beta connectors are moved from beta to general availability. 

In the following example from the October 2017 release of Power BI Desktop, the connector for Google BigQuery...