Power BI fundamentals
New to Power BI?
This two-day course takes your team from preparing data to sharing reports and keeping them up to date. No Power BI experience, DAX or coding needed.
Already building reports and looking for a day on calculations? See DAX fundamentals.
What you'll be able to do
- Build an interactive report and check how filters change its numbers.
- Clean and reshape data in Power Query, so the steps run again when the data changes.
- Connect several tables in a semantic model: the tables, relationships and calculations behind a report.
- Publish and share a report, knowing who can see it and what keeps its data current.
- Identify which part of Power BI a problem sits in, and use its vocabulary to find help.
“Thank you very much for the brilliantly delivered course.”
Read the diagram as text
Data online and data on your network feed Power Query in Power BI Desktop on your computer. Power Query gets your data and cleans it, the same way at every refresh; the model holds tables, relationships and calculations; the report shows pages, visuals and slicers. You publish the model and report to a workspace in the Power BI service online, where colleagues view, comment and subscribe, and more reports are built on the published model, with dashboards pinned from them. The service refreshes the published model from data online directly, and from data on your network through a gateway, which lets the service reach your network. Three questions sit on the parts where to start looking: a total that looks wrong on the model, a colleague who can't open it on the workspace, and numbers out of date on refresh.
The two days
I explain and demonstrate using prepared teaching data. You build and practise, with time for questions.
Exercises include recreating a visual and building a report page.
Day 1: from an Excel table to a shared report
Build a first report from an Excel table: charts, tables, slicers, filters and the sums, averages and counts Power BI creates for you.
Make it useful to its reader: suitable visuals, number formats and conditional formatting.
Get it in front of people: publishing to the Power BI service, sharing, subscriptions, comments, dashboards and a second report from the published model. See publishing arrangements.
Prepare data you can use again in Power Query: data types, cleaning, filtering, reshaping and refresh.
Day 2: what sits underneath
Build a report page: a prepared exercise with hierarchies, drill-down, refresh and republish, with help as needed.
Bring tables together: several sources, what each row represents, lookup tables and relationships that let one selection filter several tables.
Meet DAX, Power BI's formula language. I demonstrate a simple measure, a calculation responding to filters. You may write one, depending on the group's progress.
Distribute and maintain it: workspaces, sharing, licences, refresh, data source sign-ins, gateways and how the parts fit together.
Copilot in Power BI, briefly: what it can help with, why access varies and what to check. No exercise depends on it.
I'm Alan Harman-Box, and I write and teach every course myself. I've taught this course to about 300 people.
What to arrange
For dates, setup, payment and cancelling, see the private course terms.
- On site licences: I provide and manage them.
- Online licences: you arrange your own. A Power BI Pro licence is ideal, but most of the course works with a free licence.
- Publishing practice depends on licences and access.
Ask about dates
Tell me you're interested in Power BI fundamentals, how many people would come and roughly when.
Or email alan@burningsuit.co.uk.