Learning Power BI Desktop
Microsoft Power BI is a powerful cloud-based and desktop business intelligence platform that transforms raw data from many sources into interactive reports and visual insight. Recently, I completed the Learning Power BI Desktop course taught by Gini Von Courter from LinkedIn Learning. This course lasts two hours and 45 minutes and takes you through the various functions, menus, options and features in Power BI Desktop.
The first part of this course showed me how to connect and import data from multiple sources like Excel, CSV files, databases, web page sources like Wikipedia, and SharePoint lists using the get data functionality. It also showed me how to get pre made data models from the Microsoft Dataverse and explained the key differences between importing data (when Power BI stores the data directly in its cach, ‘fast’) connecting using direct query (data is not loaded into Power BI data must be refreshed to change viz, ‘slower’) and live connect (also direct query but data lives in Power BI services, ‘faster than direct query’).
After connecting to a data source this course showed me how to clean and transform data and prepare it for analysis using the Power Query editor. I learned how to remove rows and columns, change data types, set data types, filter and replace values and reduce the number of rows in a table.
The second half of this course focused on building interactive visualizations and reports with your data and sharing your models and reports effectively with your organization using Microsoft Teams or Power BI Services. I learned that Power BI Services is a cloud-based platform/repository where you can publish and share your models and unlike Power BI Desktop is the place where you can create dashboards with your data source.
This course was very insightful and gave me the information necessary to get me up and running using Power BI. Gini Von Courter is an awesome instructor and gives very clear and precise direction and I would recommend this course to any student who wants to learn Microsoft Power BI.