This course will introduce you to Microsoft’s Power BI tool for analysing and visualising data, bringing business intelligence capabilities into your hands. In this hands-on workshop, you will explore the capabilities of Power BI Desktop, Power Query Editor and the Power BI web service and discover how Power BI can help your company get real insights and valuable information from your data.

Analysts, managers, data scientists and anyone who is interested in visualizing data to get actionable insights quickly and easily. This course covers the essential skills of Power BI at all stages, so is suitable for those who have never used Power BI as well as beginners who are just starting out in their Power BI journey.

It is recommended that attendees are familiar working with data. It is also helpful to have some experience working with datasets involving more than one table, and a basic understanding of how they are related.

It would be preferable for students to have a basic understanding of:

• Formulas in Excel
• Tables and their properties (fields/columns and records/rows)
• Pivot Tables and Charts

By the end of this course, students will gain an understanding of:

• Power BI Desktop
• The Power BI Web Service
• Power Query Editor
• Importing, and cleaning data
• Relationships between data tables
• Filtering, mapping and visualising your data
• A brief introduction to DAX

Power BI Introduction

• Import data from a variety of sources
• Detect relationships between tables within our data
• See your data in new ways with bold interactive visualisations with Power BI
• Publish to the Power BI Web service
• Create Dashboards
• Use natural language Q&A to get instant answers from your data

Power BI Data Model

• Discover, combine and shape data from multiple data sources
• Create 1 to many relationships between data tables

Introduction to Power Query Editor

• Clean up queried data

Combing Data by Merge and Append

• Create wider flat file tables by merging in columns
• Append different batches of data to make a longer table

Calculated Columns

• Use the Power Query Editor to generate new columns

Introduction to DAX

• Use DAX to generate new columns

Power BI Measures

• Perform basic summarisations to gather additional insight from your data

Sorting

• How to sort by Month in order January, February March etc
• How to sort by Days of the week in order Mon, Tues Wed etc

Filtering

• Filter and slice your data to focus on exactly what you want

Drill Down

• Use hierarchies to drill down from top categories to more detailed levels

Mapping

• How to plot your data accurately on NZ maps

Sharing and Data Refresh

• Share Reports, dashboards
• Refresh your data to ensure the latest information is displayed