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

Natural language

Not all data is as straight forward as showing the sales amount by month. Often, when a report is being developed you may not know all the different visualizations a user would like to see. While Power BI has great flexibility thanks to built-in cross-filtering, drilldown, and the ability to see data behind a visual, it will never be able to cover all possible reporting scenarios. One of the most powerful ways to enable self-service functionality in Power BI is using the Q&A visual. The Q&A feature is often described as a search engine for your data.

The Q&A visual allows users to simply ask a question in natural language and receive an answer in the form of a pre-built visual. This is great for data exploration as well thanks to search suggestions and autocomplete functionality. The suggestions are only as good as the data model you have built. Without specific domain knowledge, Power BI makes suggestions for additional terms people may search for. In the...