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

Filter context

The automatic filtering that occurs in Power BI is a really awesome feature and is one of the reasons that so many companies are gravitating to this tool. The active relationships that are defined in the data model, and that you learned how to create in the previous chapter, are automatically used by DAX to perform the automatic filtering of calculated measures. This is directly tied to the concept of the filter context. You were introduced to the filter context in the previous chapter. I want to briefly expand on the previous chapter here before discussing the CALCULATE function.

A simple definition of the filter context would be that it is simply anything in your report that is filtering a measure. There are quite a few items that make up the filter context. Let's take a look at a few of them:

  • Any attributes on the rows; this includes the different axes in charts.
  • Any attributes on the columns.
  • Any filters applied by slicers (visual filters); slicers...