Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide

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

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide

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

Overview of this book

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based service that helps you easily visualize and share insights using your organization's data.This book will get you started with business intelligence using the Power BI toolset, covering essential concepts such as installation,designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to make your data come to life You will learn how to get your data the way you want – connecting to data sources sources and how to clean your data with the Power BI Query Editor. You will next learn how to properly design your data model to make your data easier to work with.. You will next learn how to properly design your data model to navigate table relationships and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is another key element of this book, and you will learn how to follow proper data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. By the end of this book, you will understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Building calculated columns

Open the pbix file Chapter 4 – Leveraging DAX from the book files

Calculated columns are stored in the table in which they are assigned, and the values are static until the data is refreshed. You will learn more about refreshing data in a later chapter.

There are many use cases for calculated columns, but the two most common are as follows:

  • Descriptive attributes
  • Concatenated key columns

Now you are going to create your first calculated column. Before you get started, though, you need to first know that Power BI Desktop has IntelliSense. IntelliSense will help you out a lot when writing code, as you will discover very soon. This built-in functionality will autocomplete your code as you go, and will also help you explore and discover new functions in the DAX language. In order to take advantage of IntelliSense, you simply need to start typing...