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

Summary

Often Power BI developers have questions concerning various data sources and what unique challenges come with each connection. The great news is once you have established a connection to your data source, regardless of which one it is, everything after that point typically follows that same pattern of steps. The point is don’t let any one data source overly intimidate you. Once you connection to it, the rest of your Power BI solution design will follow the same processes mentioned earlier in this chapter of data discovery, data modeling, data visualization, and sharing.

Power BI provides users with a variety of methods for connecting to data sources with natively built-in data connectors. The connector you choose for your solution will depend on where your data is located. Once you've connected to a data source, you can decide on what type of query mode best suits your needs. Some connectors allow for little to no latency in your results with options like DirectQuery...