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
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11
Index

Using dataflows as a data source in Power BI Desktop

Power BI dataflows act like any other imported data source. In Power BI Desktop, simply select Get data and then connect to the Power BI Dataflows option. From there, all the available dataflows will be available and organized. Once we click Get data and select the dataflow option, a familiar dialog box will appear that shows all the available dataflows we can use. As shown in Figure 8.12, your table options appear in a list on the left-hand side. Expand the folders and choose the Date table, then select Load to immediately use the table, or select Transform Data if you have more work to do in the Power Query Editor:

Figure 8.12: Expand the folder options and choose the Date dataflow, then Load to use it immediately

It is important to remember that dataflows are not datasets. Datasets are semantic models on the top of data, whereas dataflows are built on top of the dataset in a reusable schema. Additionally, dataflows...