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

Leveraging DAX

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a formula language that made its debut back in 2010 with the release of Power Pivot within Excel. Much of DAX is similar to Excel’s functions, and therefore, learning DAX is an easy transition for Excel users and Power users alike. In fact, DAX is so similar to Excel that we have seen new students become comfortable with the language and begin writing DAX within minutes.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to DAX and give you the confidence to start exploring this language on your own. Because of the limited scope of this chapter, there will not be any discussions on in-depth DAX concepts and theory. There are, of course, many other books that are dedicated to just that.

Now, let’s take a look at what is covered in this chapter:

  • Building calculated columns
  • Creating calculated measures
  • Understanding filter context
  • Working with time intelligence functions
  • Role-playing...