Book Image

Learn Power BI

By : Gregory Deckler
Book Image

Learn Power BI

By: Gregory Deckler

Overview of this book

To succeed in today's transforming business world, organizations need business intelligence capabilities to make smarter decisions faster than ever before. This Power BI book is an entry-level guide that will get you up and running with data modeling, visualization, and analytical techniques from scratch. You'll find this book handy if you want to get well-versed with the extensive Power BI ecosystem. You'll start by covering the basics of business intelligence and installing Power BI. You'll then learn the wide range of Power BI features to unlock business insights. As you progress, the book will take you through how to use Power Query to ingest, cleanse, and shape your data, and use Power BI DAX to create simple to complex calculations. You'll also be able to add a variety of interactive visualizations to your reports to bring your data to life. Finally, you'll gain hands-on experience in creating visually stunning reports that speak to business decision makers, and see how you can securely share these reports and collaborate with others. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to create simple, yet effective, BI reports and dashboards using the latest features of Power BI.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits

Transforming data

While Power BI did a good job of automatically identifying and categorizing our data, the data is not entirely in the format we will require for analysis. Therefore, we need to modify how the data gets loaded into the model. In other words, we need to transform the data. To do that, we will use a powerful sub-application: the Power Query Editor.

Touring the Power Query Editor

The Power Query Editor is launched from the Home tab of the ribbon by choosing Edit Queries from the External Data section.

Once launched, the following screen will be displayed:

Figure 6: The Query Editor

As you might expect, the Power Query Editor interface is similar to, and shares common elements with, the Desktop. The Power Query Editor...