Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Third Edition

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

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Third Edition

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

Overview of this book

Updated with the latest features and improvements in Power BI, this fast-paced yet comprehensive guide will help you master the core concepts of data visualization quickly. You’ll learn how to install Power BI, design effective data models, and build basic dashboards and visualizations to help you make better business decisions. This new edition will also help you bridge the gap between MS Excel and Power BI. Throughout this book, you’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using the Power Query Editor. You’ll also start designing data models to navigate and explore relationships within your data and building DAX formulas to make data easier to work with. Visualizing data is a key element of this book, so there’s an emphasis on helping you get to grips with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling. As you progress, you’ll start building your own dataflows, gain an understanding of the Common Data Model, and automate dataflow refreshes to eradicate data cleaning inefficiency. You’ll learn 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 know how to get the most out of Power BI for better business intelligence.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
Other Books You May Enjoy
12
Index

Gaining Data Literacy with Power BI

The amount of data produced and collected in the world daily is growing dramatically. As of a 2017 study (https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/), the best estimates are that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated each day, but that number is only expected to have grown since that study is a number of years old now and, more importantly, with the popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. With such staggering numbers, it produces major problems for organizations trying to ensure their workforce has a high level of data literacy.

Not unlike learning a foreign language, data literacy is the concept of reading, understanding, and communicating with data. In its simplest form, someone with high data literacy skills would know how to take raw data provided to them and convert it into something they can use to drive business decisions. This is a skill that takes time to learn but once an individual masters it, they can become incredibly valuable to an organization. Without high levels of data literacy, organizations can seemingly make decisions on gut feelings without supporting data influencing business plans.