Chapter 1 · 8 levels
Business intelligence and Power BI
What business intelligence is for, the four kinds of analytics, how Power BI Desktop, Service and Mobile fit together, the Desktop views and settings, Import versus DirectQuery, and your first measures.
StartHarbor & Pine runs on spreadsheets that someone rebuilds every Monday. Power BI is how the store wants to stop doing that: connect once to the data, model it once, and give every manager a report that refreshes by itself and answers their questions with a click.
This chapter is the map before the journey. You sort business questions into the four kinds of analytics, follow a report from Power BI Desktop to the Service and a phone, find your way around the Report, Data and Model views, pick the settings experienced report builders change on day one, and choose between importing data and querying it live.
Power BI Desktop runs on Windows only, so this track teaches the same skills in practice tools built into the page. Here that means DAX: you write a measure, and the engine fills a matrix with it cell by cell, the way Power BI does. Every lesson also gives the exact place to do it for real in Power BI Desktop. The chapter ends with a boss level: three measures for a channel review.
Levels
- What happened, why, what next, what to do
from Megan Collins, Head of Sales
business intelligence, descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics
- Prepare, model, visualize, analyze, manage
from Priya Shah, Head of Data
power bi workflow, prepare, model, visualize, analyze, manage
- Desktop, Service and Mobile, reports and dashboards
from Catherine Hale, CEO
power bi desktop, power bi service, power bi mobile, semantic model, report, dashboard, tile
- Report, Table and Model view, and the three panes
from Jordan Reyes, Head of Marketing
report view, table view, model view, data pane, visualizations pane, filters pane
- Your first measure, units ordered
from Daniel Brooks, Inventory Planner
dax, measure, sum, matrix, filter context
- The settings to change on day one
from Ethan Cole, Senior BI Developer
options, auto date time, regional settings, locale for import, autodetect relationships, summarization
- Import, DirectQuery or a live connection?
from Kevin Nguyen, Head of Engineering
import mode, directquery, live connection, storage mode, refresh, semantic model
- Boss: three measures for the channel review
from Robert Kim, COO
dax, measure, sum, countrows, divide, average order value, filters pane, filter context