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
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11
Index

Building calculated columns

In this section, you will learn how to create calculated columns in Power BI using DAX. The building of calculated columns is a great way of extending the analytical capability of Power BI and by the end of this chapter, you will feel very comfortable with creating new columns through DAX. The writing of calculated columns logically occurs after the data model has been developed, therefore, in order to follow along with this section, you will need to open the pbix file Chapter 4 – Leveraging DAX.pbix from the Microsoft-Power-BI-Start-Guide-Second-Edition-main\Starting Examples directory.

Calculated columns are stored in the table in which they are assigned, and the values are static until the data is refreshed. You will learn more about refreshing data in a later chapter.

There are many use cases for calculated columns, but the two most common are as follows:

  • Descriptive attributes
  • Concatenated key columns

Now you...