PowerBI certification prep!

Part 1: Here I talk about the basics of PowerBI as I explore this tool.

Hi everyone!

I recently enrolled in a Udemy course for my PowerBI certification prep. In this blog I will tell you a basic outline of what I am learning and you can follow along or skip to the next post if you already know the concepts!

1. Connecting, Loading and transforming the data

   
   

   I spent some good amount of time, looking to change format of the measure (from # to %) - the trick is to click on the measure name on the right in Data section and go to Modeling tab - only then you would be able to view "Format" option.

2. Changing the data source

Just like Tableau - it has "Import" (extract) and "DirectQuery" (live) option to connect data sources but there is another option called "Dual" (has both DirectQuery and Import tables)

Performance Issues:

Too many applied steps

• Folding queries - heavy lifting to DW

• Like instead of filtering on the dashboard, filter it at the source (pulling only the data that you need)

Parameter Creation:

As compared to Tableau, here we don't have to create a calculated field to reference to the the Parameter. We can just filter on the rows using conditions and use "Parameter" in the dropdown box.

But the way parameters work in Tableau and PowerBI are different. In PowerBI, parameters prompt the user to make a selection and then accordingly filter the data on opening.

You can look for anamolies using scatter chart/histogram

You can get data quality snapshot which is pretty cool.

3. Clean, Transform and Load Data (using PowerQuery)

4. Learnt how to transform data - split columns, replace values, extract characters - You can just use "Replace Values" function let's say you want to replace nulls with 0, with a dialog box prompted, you can easily do that. In Tableau you had to write a function for that but this is way simpler in PowerBI.

5. Joining data tables - one cool thing I learnt was that you can even fuzzy match! That's definitely isn't in Tableau.

   1. You can do so much with "Transform" section in PowerQuery - like "fill down", replace values, format, extract etc. Check out what each function does, it's pretty smooth and seamless!

   2. You can merge, append the data sources

      
      

6. M code - It is the power query M code where you can update the applied steps

7. You can select which data source needs to be refreshed/not get refreshed using "Include in Report refresh"

   
   

Alright, for now, this is it!