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

Which should I choose?

Now that you have learned about the three different ways to connect to your data, you are left wondering which option is best for you. It's fair to say that the choice you make will really depend on the requirements of each individual project you have.

To summarize, some of the considerations that were mentioned in this chapter are listed in the following table:

Consideration Import Data DirectQuery Live connection
Best performance Yes No Yes
Best design experience Yes No No
Best for keeping data up to date No Yes Yes
Data source availability Yes No No
Most scalable No Yes Yes

Some of the items you'll consider may be more important than others. So, to make this more personal, try using the Data Connectivity - Decision Matrix file that is included with this book. In this file, you can rank (from 1 to 10) the importance of each of these considerations to help you choose which option is best for you.

Since the Import Data option presents the...