Course Description and Format

In this 1 hour online learning course on Power BI, you will learn how Power BI can be used to connect to sources of data like Excel files, CSV, files, Access, Microsoft Exchange and a whole host of other data sources that you may already have and use!

We’ll discuss the four Power BI elements of:

• Power Query, which allows us to connect our Power BI files to a variety of data sources and then transform the structure of that data so that it’s easy to use in the Data Model.
• The Data Model which is where we link our datasets together, create new columns of data as well as create dynamic column totals called measures, using Power BI’s analytical code called DAX.
• The Report View where we present our data in beautiful, easy to understand visualisations (graphs and charts) and then…
• Finally publish the whole reports up on Power BI Online, so that others can delight in your report
  
  Once we’ve discussed the theory, then we’ll open up Power BI and walk through the four elements in Power BI itself so that you can see how the different parts of Power BI work together to create some beautiful reports.

Power BI problem solving

Finally we’ll talk through the common business problems (and there are a lot of them!) that Power BI can solve. Here’s a few:

• The Business Continuity Problem – where business critical reports are created by one person through doing lots of complicated things with data from lots of different places. Then … disaster! That person is out of or leaves the business! What happens to the report?!
• The Row Limit Problem – where datasets have more rows than an Excel spreadsheet can handle, what do you do then?
• The Excel is reeeaaally sloooooow problem – where datasets that aren’t that close to the Excel row limit but are so complex that Excel takes an age to respond or even open?!
• The I’m constantly cleaning data problem – plenty of analysis/documents/reports/reconciliations etc are created from reports that need new columns, rows removed, date information extracted, unpivoting or pivoting, grouping, data from different datasets joined together and so on. All that cleaning and transforming wastes time and stops you from getting on to work that actually adds value. This also leads to the…
• The accuracy and completeness problem – as soon as staff need to do lots of transforming of raw data in an Excel file, the chance of errors being made goes up, ranging from data accidentally deleted to functions not being used properly. Bad data leads to bad decisions
• The Time vs Security problem – plenty of reports need to go to lots of different stakeholders, each of whom only need part of the report. You can choose to create individual reports for each person, which takes time, but so that each stakeholder only sees the information they should or you can create one report for everyone which is quick but not secure. Which option to choose?
• The Data Privacy problem – how many Excel (or Powerpoint!) reports fly round a company by email carrying data extracted from a system? When the data in those reports can be subject to data privacy laws, the chances of a data leak or not complying with a data change request go up significantly.
  
  All of these problems are frustrating, waste time, reduce efficiency, increase costs and limit the possibility for identifying insight. And all of them, every single one (and a few more, not on the list) can be solved with Power BI.