Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By : Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By: Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky

Overview of this book

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions. You’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You’ll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you’ll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency. This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented. By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
10
Other Books You May Enjoy
11
Index

Getting started

Power BI Desktop is available for free and can be found via a direct download link at Power BI (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/), or by installing it as an app from Microsoft Store. There are several benefits of using the Microsoft Store Power BI app, including automatic updates, no requirement for admin privileges, and making it easier for planned IT rollout of Power BI.

If you are using the on-premises Power BI Report Server for your deployment strategy, then you must download a different Power BI Desktop, which is available by clicking the advanced download options link at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/. A separate installation is required because updates are released more often to Power BI in the cloud. This book will be written primarily under the assumption that you are using the cloud-hosted Power BI Service as your deployment strategy.

Once you've downloaded, installed, and launched Power BI Desktop, you will likely...