Deckler, Greg Learn Microsoft Power BI

A comprehensive, beginner-friendly guide to real-world business intelligence
3. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83664-740-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 468 Seiten

Everyone's swimming in data. The ones who thrive? They know how to make sense of it with the right tools quickly and effectively. Learn Microsoft Power BI, Third Edition is your essential guide to mastering one of the most powerful platforms for data analysis and visualization. In this newly revised and expanded edition, Greg Deckler, a 7-time Microsoft MVP and Power BI expert, takes you on a journey of data exploration and discovery using Microsoft Power BI to ingest, cleanse, and organize data and uncover key business insights that can be shared effectively.
Covering the latest features and interface changes, including Microsoft Fabric and Copilot, this book guides you through deploying, adopting, and governing Power BI within your organization. You'll get to grips with the fundamentals of business intelligence projects and learn how to leverage your expertise in the broader Power BI ecosystem. From ingesting and cleansing your data to transforming it into stunning visualizations, reports, and dashboards that speak to business decision-makers, this book will fully prepare you to become the data analysis hero of your organization or kickstart a rewarding career in business intelligence.
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Autoren/Hrsg.

Deckler, Greg, Greg Deckler

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein

Leseproben

Preface

To succeed in today’s fast-paced business world, organizations need Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities more than ever in order to make smarter decisions that allow them to be more efficient, effective, and profitable. This book is an entry-level guide specifically designed to get you up and running quickly with Power BI, including data import and transformation, data modeling, visualization, and analytical techniques, without any prior knowledge of BI or Power BI.

You will find this book useful if you want to become knowledgeable about the extensive Power BI ecosystem. You’ll start by understanding basic BI concepts and how BI projects are conducted. In short order, you will have Power BI Desktop installed and understand its major components. As you progress, step-by-step instructions are provided for using the Power Query Editor to ingest, cleanse, and transform your data, creating simple and complex DAX calculations, and visualizing your data in ways that truly bring your data to life. Additionally, you’ll gain hands-on experience in creating visually stunning reports that speak to business decision-makers and understand how to share and collaborate with others. Finally, you will understand how Power BI is deployed, governed, and adopted within organizations, the job and career opportunities available to BI professionals, and how to continue your learning.

By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to create effective reports and dashboards using the latest features of Power BI.

Who this book is for

If you are new to BI or you are a business analyst or other technical or non-technical user who is new to Power BI, then this book is for you. No prior experience in BI or Power BI is required in order to proceed.

What this book covers

, provides an introduction to key concepts of business intelligence, an overview of the Power BI ecosystem, and licensing options for Power BI, and introduces Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service.

, explains how BI projects are planned and executed, including identifying stakeholders, goals, requirements, required resources, and data sources, and introduces the example scenario used throughout the rest of the book.

, provides instructions for downloading and installing Power BI Desktop and an overview of the major components of the Desktop including Report, Data and Model views, the menu tabs, the filters, and the Visualizations and Fields panes. It also introduces the creation of tables and visualizations.

, introduces the Power Query Editor for importing and transforming data, including transposing data, creating custom columns, adding index columns, splitting columns, referencing queries, appending and merging queries, additional transformation functions, and importing data.

, demonstrates how to create a data model by using the model view to create relationships between tables, and how to create and troubleshoot data analysis calculations.

, introduces analysis concepts such as groups and hierarchies, row-level security, report navigation using drill through and buttons, question and answer, bookmarks, and advanced analysis techniques such as analysis, summarization, filtering, gauges, key performance indicators, What if parameters, conditional formatting, quick measures, report page tooltips, and advanced visuals such as the Key Influencers visual.

, provides step-by-step instructions for creating a professional, multi-page report that provides data insights to business decision-makers.

, demonstrates how to publish the final report to the Power BI service and share the report with a larger audience.

, focuses on using reports in the Power BI service including all of the various report functions such as editing reports, embedding, exporting, bookmarks, lineage view, comments, subscriptions, and Microsoft Teams integration.

, provides information on creating and working with dashboards, including pinning and managing tiles, the creation and distribution of apps, the creation of scorecards and goals, and an overview of permissions and security.

, demonstrates how to install, configure, and manage a data gateway, and how to schedule automatic refreshes for datasets within the Power BI service.

, introduces different deployment usage models for Power BI within organizations, the concept of governance of Power BI systems including all of the various Power BI Service tenant settings, and how to drive the adoption of Power BI within an organization.

, introduces you to the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and Copilot within the context of scaling a Power BI solution for enterprise use, including the full process of building and managing Fabric items such as dataflows, warehouses, and semantic models. It also introduces Microsoft Copilot, showcasing how generative AI can assist with data preparation, report creation, SQL generation, and troubleshooting across Fabric workloads.

, describes the overall opportunities available in BI, the various types of BI jobs, roles, and responsibilities, the differences between consulting and internal employees, job search strategies, interviewing and compensation negotiation tips, and finally, information on blogs and other websites to continue your journey of learning Power BI.

To get the most out of this book

No prior experience in BI or Power BI is necessary. A keen interest in data and data analytics is helpful as well as prior experience with other BI tools. Running the Power BI Desktop and Data Gateway both require using a computer with Windows as the operating system.

, , includes material that requires a Fabric trial capacity or Premium Per User (PPU) licensing.

includes material that requires a Fabric trial capacity.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Join the Power BI Community at https://community.powerbi.com!

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Microsoft-Power-BI_3E. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/gbp/9781836647416.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

: Indicates code words in the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and X/Twitter handles. Here is an example: “The first parameter is the table, on line 4, and a filter, on line 5.”

A block of code is set as follows:

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Power Platform includes Power BI datasets and dataflows, as well as the Dataverse.”

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book or have any general feedback, please email us at and mention the book’s title in the subject of your message.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to...