Getting Started with Microsoft Power BI Training

By: Greg Robidoux   |   Updated: 2024-05-20   |   Comments   |   Related: > Power BI

Problem

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool to create reports, charts and dashboards to allow users to visualize data in a much easier way. Power BI was not built for just IT professionals, but built for anyone as a self-service business intelligence platform for real-time data analytics. Whether the source data is text files, Microsoft Excel, SQL Server or some other data source (Big Data, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.), Power BI allows you to use one business intelligence tool for business analytics, data analysis and data visualization.

Like any new technology, it takes time to get familiar with new tools and to learn the ins and outs to using the tool effectively. In this article, we look at several resources to help you kick-start your use of Power BI.

Solution

MSSQLTips authors have published over 200 articles on various real-world aspects of Power BI including charts and formatting. How to get started can be a bit daunting with so many resources. Most articles help you solve a specific problem, but there are several that will point you in the right direction so you can become proficient when getting started with building reports, charts and dashboards with Power BI.

To help answer some of the fundamentals about Power BI, the following articles will help developers and data analysts:

• Power BI - What is it and how do I use it?
• Power BI - The What, Why and How
• Power BI - What I wish I knew when I started?

Downloading, Installing and Getting Started

Although there are several flavors of Power BI and you can begin using Power BI Desktop immediately with a simple download and install which you can do with the help of this article:

• Power BI - How to Download and Get Started

After the installation, you can check out these articles:

• Getting Started with Power BI - Part 1
• Getting Started with Power BI and Power Query for Simple ETL - Part 2

Here are links to additional Power BI articles:

• Power BI
• Power BI charts and graphs
• Power BI formatting
• DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) Tutorial

Microsoft Power BI Training Course

The ultimate method of learning a new tool is to utilize a comprehensive tutorial that walks you through many of the facets to know what is available and how to find these features.

This is why we put together the Introduction to Power BI course. Here is a word from the instructor:

This course will allow you to get up to speed much quicker by walking through various aspects of Power BI along with building a complete report from start to finish to see many of the Power BI features in action.

This interactive training course consists of 29 modules with over 3 hours of video content, sample data sets and reports so you can follow along with the lessons and learn Power BI.

At a high level, the self-paced online training course covers the following topics:

• Power BI Overview
  • What is Power BI
  • Power BI Examples
• Power BI Interface and Sample Reports
  • Power BI Interface
  • Power BI Simple Report, Importing Data, Formatting
• Loading Data
  • Using SQL Server Data for reports
  • Using Other Data Sources for reports
• Building a Power BI Report
  • Charts
  • Filtering
  • Slicing
  • Formatting
  • Hierarchies
  • Publishing
  • Dashboards
• Power Query
  • Data Profiling
  • Data Types
  • Column Management
  • Query Management
  • Calculated Columns
• Build Report from Start to Finish
  • Load and Transform Data
  • Data Modelling
  • Building the Report
• Collaboration and Sharing

Next Steps

• If you're ready to learn from an instructor-led training course on how to best use Microsoft Power BI then sign up for the Introduction to Power BI online course.
• Check out this Power BI on-demand webinar and look for the special discount offer.

About the author

Greg Robidoux is the President and founder of Edgewood Solutions, a technology services company delivering services and solutions for Microsoft SQL Server. He is also one of the co-founders of MSSQLTips.com. Greg has been working with SQL Server since 1999, has authored numerous database-related articles, and delivered several presentations related to SQL Server. Before SQL Server, he worked on many data platforms such as DB2, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix.

This author pledges the content of this article is based on professional experience and not AI generated.

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