Course Content

1. Introduction to Power BI

• Overview of BI concepts
• Why we need BI?
• Introduction to SSBI
• SSBI Tools
• Why Power BI?
• What is Power BI?
• Building Blocks of Power BI
• Getting started with Power BI Desktop

2. Power BI Desktop

• Power BI Desktop
• Extracting data from various sources
• Workspaces in Power BI
• Data Transformation
• Measures and Calculated Columns
• Query Editor

3. Data Analysis Expressions (DAX)

• Modelling Data
• Manage Data Relationship
• Optimize Data Models
• What is DAX?
• Data Types in DAX
• Calculation Types
• DAX Functions: Date and Time, Time Intelligence, Information, Logical, Mathematical, Statistical, Text and Aggregate
• Measures in DAX

4. Data Visualization

• How to use Visual in Power BI?
• Charts in Power BI
• Matrixes and tables
• Slicers
• Map Visualizations
• Gauges and Single Number Cards
• R Visuals in Power BI
• What Are Custom Visuals?
• KPI Visuals
• Data Binding
• Power BI report server

5. Introduction to Power BI Q&A and Data Insights

• Why Dashboard?
• Dashboard vs Reports
• Creating Dashboards
• Configuring a Dashboard: Dashboard Tiles, Pinning Tiles
• Power BI Q&A
• Quick Insights in Power BI
• Power BI embedded
• REST API

• Custom Data Gateways
• Exploring live connections to data with Power BI
• Connecting directly to SQL Azure, HD Spark, and SQL Server Analysis Services/ My SQL
• Introduction to Power BI Development API
• Excel with Power BI: Connect Excel to Power BI, Power BI Publisher for Excel
• Content packs
• Update content packs

7. Integrating Power BI and Azure ML

• Extracting data out of Azure SQL using R
• Using R, call the Azure ML web service and send it the unscored data
• Writing the output of the Azure ML model back into SQL
• Read scored data into Power BI using R
• Publishing the Power BI file to the Power BI service
• Scheduling a refresh of the data using the Personal Gateway

Trainer Profile

Interview Questions & Answer

1) What is power BI?

Business analytics service provided by Microsoft to provide visualizations that is interactive to the customer or the user is called Power BI. Business intelligence capabilities are improved with the help of different dashboards or reports so that end users find it easy to understand the data. It provides multiple software connectors and services. Organization’s data is loaded and it provides better insights of the data than other analysis techniques. The data is transformed, cleaned and it creates charts or graphs to recognize the patterns of the data. Power BI desktop is free and there is Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium.

2) How does power bi works?

Business decisions are made on the basis of all the data collected. This data can be of all kind, excel data, warehouse data, unstructured data, blogs, videos, images. The whole point of BI is to pull that data in order to analyse and visualize the data, irrespective of where it comes from and what form it is collected in.

Components of Power BI:

Power BI desktop: this you can download for free from the Microsoft website.

Power BI services: this is a cloud service in the MS cloud offerings and the point of the service is enabling and sharing collaboration.

Power bi mobile Apps: it lets you use power bi on your mobile or tablets. It allows you to do annotations and settings alerts right from the phone.

3) What are the actions one can perform in Power BI?

There are various actions one can perform on Power BI. This can help perform more actions on the data and get more insights that help in making informed decisions. Power BI helps you:

• Connect to multiple data sources (more than 70)
• Export the results to Powerpoint, Excel, etc.
• Publish the results to a web
• Collaboration with peers, other apps
• Embed API’s and controls

  4) What are the features of power bi?

• Power BI Dashboards are available in Power BI web Service.
• Can use DrillThrough page, Bookmarks and Selection pane.
• Tiles can be directly pinned from reports to dashboards which gives very high-level day to day view of main KPIs of business and by a click on tiles will navigates back to reports for detailed view
• Report layout can be set to Mobile view.
• Apart from that various tiles can be created like Web Content, Images, Textbox and integrate URLs, Videos, and custom streaming data tile.

5) What is DAX and where it is used in power BI?

DAX is the language of Power BI. It stands for Data Analysis Expressions. It’s a collection of functions, operators, and constants used in formulas to calculate and return values.

Power BI Product team created DAX by mashing up “Excel formula Language”, “SQL Language” and “MDX Language” 

DAX is Simple, but it’s not easy. Do not try to learn It in the usual way. You need to spend time to understand hard parts. 

Syntax elements:

1. Name of Measure is “Total Sales”.
2. operator (=) equals sign implies its beginning of the formula and returns the result.
3. Adds up all of the numbers in the column Sales[SalesAmount] using SUM Function
4. All functions require one or more argument surrounded by Parenthesis ()
5. Name of Table “Sales” 
6. The column [SalesAmount] in the Sales table and SUM function is used to aggregate Sales.

6) What are the unique features of power BI report?

• Power BI reports are created in Power BI Desktop.
• Advanced Q&A and tooltip option can be enabled.
• Various report page size can be set like (16:8, 4:3, Letter, Tool Tip, Cortana, and custom).
• Set Page Background and Wallpaper.
• It Can use DrillThrough page, Bookmarks and Selection pane.
• Download Custom Visualizations from marketplace
• Set Color Themes to reports
• Can printout of reports similar to Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations.
• Exported to PDF
• Contains 190+ DAX functions to apply on our data, whenever necessary.
• Save as Template file (.PBIT).
• Report layout can be set to Desktop as well as Mobile.

7) What are Custom Visuals?

Custom Visuals are those visuals which are not available in BI desktop, which are imported from the market for the purpose of better visualization. In other words, Custom visual files are created by developers, and you can import them and use them in the same way as you would the pre-packaged files.

8) In Power Query, what is query folding?

This is when steps defined in the Query Editor are translated into SQL and executed by the source database, instead of by your own device. It helps with scalability and efficient processing.

9) How does Power BI store data?

Once data is loaded in Power BI, it is then stored in two forms of tables.

• Fact Tables – This is the storehouse of quantitative data. On most occasions, these aren’t normalized. 
• Dimension Tables – These stores more qualitative information. They contain the attributes and dimensions of the data in the fact tables. 

10)  What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot is an add-in for Microsoft Excel 2010 which  empowers you to import a huge number of columns of information from numerous information sources into a single Excel exercise Workbook. It gives you a chance to make connections between heterogeneous information, create columns and measures utilizing equations, construct PivotTables and PivotCharts. You would then be able to further select the information so you can make timely business choices without needing IT help.

11) What is Power Pivot Data Model?

It is a model that is comprised of data types, tables, segments, and table relations. These data tables are normally built for holding information for a business element.

Blog