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

Importing data

Power BI is best known for the impressive data visualizations and dashboard capabilities it has. However, before you can begin building reports, you first need to connect to the necessary data sources. Within Power BI Desktop, a developer has more than 130 unique data connectors to choose from, ranging from traditional file types, database engines, big data solutions, cloud sources, data stored on a web page, and other SaaS providers. This book will not cover all 130 connectors that are available, but it will highlight some of the most popular.

When establishing a connection to a data source, you may be presented with one of three different options regarding how your data will be treated: Import, DirectQuery, or live connection. This section will focus specifically on the Import option.

Choosing to import data, which is the most common option and default behavior, means that Power BI will physically extract rows of data from the selected source and store it...