Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

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

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

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

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

Leveraging DAX

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a formula language that made its debut back in 2010 with the release of Power Pivot within Excel. Much of DAX is similar to Excel's functions, and therefore learning DAX is an easy transition for Excel users and Power users alike. In fact, DAX is so similar to Excel that I have seen new students become comfortable with the language and begin writing DAX within minutes.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to DAX and give you the confidence to start exploring this language on your own. Because of the brevity of this chapter, there will not be any discussions on in-depth DAX concepts and theory. There are, of course, many other books that are dedicated to just that.

Now, let's take a look at what is covered in this chapter:

  • Building calculated columns
  • Calculated measures – the basics
  • Calculated measures – filter context
  • Calculated measures – time intelligence...