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

Scheduling data refreshes

Refreshing data in Power BI Report Server comes with a lot more caveats than using the Power BI cloud service. For example, refreshing is contingent on the data source that the report is using. Since you’ve installed this server inside your firewall, there’s no need for a data management gateway to refresh the data either. As you create refreshing schedules, the server will simply create SQL Server Agent jobs to control the refreshes, such as Reporting Services.

If you plan on refreshing data sources that are derived from files, make sure you use a network path for that file (\\computername\sharename\file.csv), not a local path (such as C:\Downloads\File.csv). You can do this in Power BI Desktop by going to the Home ribbon and selecting Edit Queries | Data Source Settings. Click Change Source and change any file references to a network path, such as \\MyComputer\c$\Downloads\File.csv.

Once you do that, publish the report to the server...