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

M formula language


The Power Query Editor is the user interface that you have now learned is used to design and build data imports. However, you should also know that every transform you apply within this editor is actually, quietly and behind the scenes, writing an M query for you. The letter M here is a reference to the languages data mashup capabilities.

For simple solutions, it is unlikely that you will ever need to even look at the M query that is being written, but there are some more complex cases where it's helpful to understand how to read and write your own M. For the purposes of this book, covering just the Power BI essentials, you will learn how to find the M query editor within your solution and then understand how to read what it is doing for you. For the purposes of this example, you can open up any previously built example, however, the screenshot used here is coming from the very first example in this chapter on basic transforms.

  1. Using any Power BI solution you have designed...