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

Creating a dataflow

A very common reason to use dataflows is the reusability of the data among team members. Consistency and having a single source of truth is the main goal for many analysts, and a great application of this is a Date table. For this exercise, a Pro license with no additional premium capacity is necessary. In this section, we will explore the Power BI service to see where dataflows are created and then use simple code to produce a dataflow that will work in many different data models.

Dataflows are created and managed in-app workspaces in Power BI, but the data you bring into a Power BI dataflow is stored as entities—basically flat tables—in the Common Data Model folders in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. These files are stored as CSVs with JSON files containing all the metadata and rules, which unify and standardize your self-service data warehouse. Once created, these dataflows then serve as a data source for Power BI reports, and can also be used...