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

Getting started

Power BI is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering in the Azure cloud and, as such, the Microsoft product team follows a strategy of cloud first as they develop and add new features to the product. Power BI is also one of five members of Microsoft’s Power Platform:

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Figure 2.1: Microsoft’s Power Platform suite of tools

Each of the tools within the Power Platform solves distinctly different problems, but what they have in common is who their core user audience is intended to be. The Power Platform and all the tools included within it are designed and built so business users can solve and design solutions on their own rather than relying solely on their IT department. All five tools within the Power Platform leverage Microsoft’s cloud architecture and allow for seamless integration between the different tools. Leveraging the features of each Power Platform tool (Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents...