The main purpose of this comprehensive course is to review and master the essential skills needed to successfully take data from Excel into Microsoft Power BI, then systematically transform and shape that data, create robust data models, build professional reports, and finally publish those reports on the Power BI cloud service. This course provides practical, hands-on training that takes you through the entire workflow from raw data to production-ready reporting solutions.
Audience Profile:
This course is specifically designed for individuals who are not IT professionals or database administrators, but who have genuine business needs to easily create, manage, and publish professional reports using Power BI. Business analysts, data-savvy professionals, and departmental leaders will find this course particularly valuable for developing self-service analytics capabilities within their organizations.
Prerequisites:
Before attending this course, students should have practical experience creating worksheets and performing calculations in Excel. Familiarity with PivotTables and data summarization techniques is a plus and will be helpful, but prior Pivot Table experience is not strictly required. Basic data literacy and comfort with spreadsheet applications will serve you well throughout this course.
Course Format Note:
This class is also available as a Microsoft Official Course. While this course is specifically designed for average end users and business professionals who need to learn essential Power BI skills quickly and practically, there is also a more comprehensive, in-depth version available. The advanced 3-day course titled "Analyzing Data with Power BI (20778)" is specifically for IT professionals and power users who want a significantly deeper dive into advanced technical material and who are preparing to pass related Microsoft certification exams. Microsoft Software Assurance Vouchers can also be accepted as payment for the official course versions.
Course Outline:
Getting Started with Power BI
- Introducing Power BI and its capabilities
- Understanding how to use Power BI effectively for business reporting
- A comprehensive quick look at Power BI Desktop and its interface
- A comprehensive, quick look at the Power BI service and cloud capabilities
Integrating Power BI and Excel
- Introduction to using Excel data in Power BI
- Uploading Excel data to Power BI for processing
- Importing Power View visualizations and Power Pivot models to Power BI
Getting and Connecting to Data
- Overview of Power BI Desktop and its components
- Getting started with Power BI Desktop for data import
- Connect to various data sources in Power BI Desktop
- Exploring more advanced data sources and transformation techniques
Shaping and Transforming Data
- Introduction to the Query Editor and its transformation capabilities
- Clean and transform your data using the comprehensive Query Editor tools
- Cleaning irregularly formatted data from various sources
Building and Optimizing Data Models
- Introduction to modeling your data for effective reporting
- How to manage your data relationships and create efficient schemas
- Create calculated columns to add new dimensions to your data
- Optimizing data models for performance and usability
- Create calculated measures for advanced analysis
- Create calculated tables for specific analytical purposes
- Explore your time-based data and temporal analysis
- Introduction to DAX and why it matters
- Understanding DAX calculation types and when to use each
- Mastering common DAX functions and their applications
Creating Professional Visualizations
- Introduction to visuals in Power BI and visualization best practices
- Create and customize simple visualizations for clear communication
- Modify colors, formatting, and appearance in charts and visuals
- Adding shapes, text boxes, and images to enhance reports
- Page layout and comprehensive formatting for professional reports
- Group and manage interactions among multiple visualizations
- Create visual hierarchies and enable drill-down functionality
- Using custom visualizations and specialized visual types
- Integrating R programming and Python visualizations in Power BI Desktop
Publishing, Sharing, and Collaborating
- Introduction to the Power BI service and its cloud capabilities
- Using quick insights to automatically discover patterns in your data
- Create and configure a comprehensive dashboard for executive reporting
- Ask questions of your data using natural language and Q&A features
- Create custom Q&A suggestions to guide users
- Share dashboards and reports securely with your organization
- Install and configure a personal gateway for on-premises data
- Introduction to content packs, security, and collaborative groups
- Publish Power BI Desktop reports to the Power BI service
- Print and export dashboards and reports in various formats
- Manually republish and refresh your data to keep reports current
- Create groups in Power BI for team collaboration
- Use content packs to share standardized analytics
- Update and manage content packs across your organization
- Publish reports to the web for external stakeholder access
