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 queries


With the SQL views created, the data sources configured, and the Power BI Desktop environment options applied, the dataset designer can finally develop the data retrieval queries and parameters of the dataset.

Within the Power Query Editor of Power BI Desktop, group folders can be used to organize M queries into common categories such as Data Source Parameters, Staging Queries, Fact table Queries, Dimension Table Queries, and Bridge Table Queries as shown in the following screenshot:

Power Query Editor in Power BI Desktop with group folders

The parameters and queries displayed with a gray font are included in the refresh process of the dataset but not loaded to the data modeling layer. For example, the AdWorksSQLServer query displayed in the preceding image merely exposes the objects of the SQL Server database via the Sql.Database() M function for other queries to reference. This query, along with the data source parameters, all have a gray font and are used to streamline the data...