About 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.

Publication date:: September 2019
Publisher: Packt
Pages: 362
ISBN: 9781838644482
Download code from GitHub

Section 1: The Basics

The objective of this section is to introduce you to key concepts, example scenarios, and downloading supporting data of Power BI.

This section comprises of the following chapter:

Chapter 1, Introduction to Business Intelligence and Power BI

About the Author

Greg Deckler

Greg Deckler is a 7-time Microsoft MVP for Data Platform and an active blogger and Power BI community member, having written over 6,000 solutions to community questions. Greg has authored many books on Power BI, including Learn Power BI 1st and 2nd Editions, DAX Cookbook, Power BI Cookbook 2nd Edition and Mastering Power BI 2nd Edition. Greg has also created several external tools for Power BI and regularly posts video content to his YouTube channels, Microsoft Hates Greg and DAX For Humans.
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So far after Chapter 2, details of the book do not seem to match up well with the book examples, as if nobody actually reviewed the material checking for accuracy. Reviewers did not seem to thoroughly go through the book and work through the examples for accuracy.I am able to work through the examples, but needed to use my own curiosity with the program on many of the examples to accomplish the goal.

I was a bit puzzled (my fault probably) because the title gave me the impression that it would address users that have some familiarity with BI or have played a bit with it. I was able to ... follow until page 100. Then the DAX expressions became lengthy (as in really lengthy). As I am learning (struggling) with DAX, many 18+ lines expressions were very intimidating. I put is aside for a while at page 150.The author discusses about why a report (output) isn't accurate and how to solve it, but I was never able to understand clearly where was the problem to fix. The publishers, Packt, have a great customer services if you find a typo for an instruction that is not 100% accurate.In essence, to really enjoy this book you should have worked by yourselves with PowerBI for a number of months and have "some level" of expertise with DAX. My 10 cents...

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