Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Certification Guide

By : Orrin Edenfield, Edward Corcoran
5 (1)
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Certification Guide

5 (1)
By: Orrin Edenfield, Edward Corcoran

Overview of this book

Microsoft Power BI enables organizations to create a data-driven culture with business intelligence for all. This guide to achieving the Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate certification will help you take control of your organization's data and pass the exam with confidence. From getting started with Power BI to connecting to data sources, including files, databases, cloud services, and SaaS providers, to using Power BI’s built-in tools to build data models and produce visualizations, this book will walk you through everything from setup to preparing for the certification exam. Throughout the chapters, you'll get detailed explanations and learn how to analyze your data, prepare it for consumption by business users, and maintain an enterprise environment in a secure and efficient way. By the end of this book, you'll be able to create and maintain robust reports and dashboards, enabling you to manage a data-driven enterprise, and be ready to take the PL-300 exam with confidence.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Preparing the Data
6
Part 2 – Modeling the Data
11
Part 3 – Visualizing the Data
15
Part 4 – Analyzing the Data
18
Part 5 – Deploying and Maintaining Deliverables
21
Part 6 – Practice Exams

Define the appropriate level of data granularity

One key way to establish what your report can contain is establishing its granularity, or grain. The grain is the smallest level your report can go to. It is not uncommon for data in a fact table to be stored as a daily or monthly total. If you are storing sales by store by day, you should not divide that number by 24 to get hourly totals. That number implies a degree of certainty that is not actually in the data.

I'm going to present a screenshot from earlier, but this time talk about what we are relating, not how.

Figure 5.17– The grain of the Sales table is product by Region Name and OrderNumber

Here, you can see that our Manager table can filter our Sales table through the Region table, and the other way around: Sales>Region>Manager. If I filter the Manager table by ManagerName, it will filter the Sales table by Region. So, if Ted and Ananya both manage the Midwest region, both will...