Название: Beginning Power BI for Business Users: Learning to Turn Data into Insights
Автор: Paul D. Fuller
Издательство: Wiley
Год: 2024
Страниц: 288
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 39.5 MB

Discover the utility of your organization's data with Microsoft Power BI.

In Beginning Power BI for Business Users: Learning to Turn Data into Insights, accomplished data professional and business intelligence expert Paul Fuller delivers an intuitive and accessible handbook for professionals seeking to use Microsoft's Power BI to access, analyze, understand, report, and act on the data available to their organizations. In the book, you'll discover Power BI's robust feature set, learn to ingest and model data, visualize and report on that data, and even use the DAX scripting language to unlock still more utility from Microsoft's popular program.

Beginning with general principles geared to readers with no or little experience with reporting or data analytics tools, the author walks you through how to manipulate common, publicly available data sources—including Excel files and relational databases.

As a data analytics engineer, I've loved using Power BI since it was introduced many years ago. But I'm a tech nerd. And many of the experts in Power BI are also geeks like me. But here's the thing—Power BI is meant to be a tool for business users and data analysts. It's intended to be simple enough to get started and see amazing things quickly but sophisticated enough that the information technology (IT) folks can use it as well.

In my years in consulting, I have worked with many clients who are simply business users wanting to learn Power BI. They typically have been Excel gurus who live and die by their spreadsheets. And they still will need those spreadsheets at times, but they know that Power BI will take them where they couldn't go with Excel. But they were stuck. Their IT departments would give them access to use Power BI. Some of these clients would start with Power BI quickly but get discouraged because they weren't exactly sure how to use it correctly. Some of these clients didn't know how to begin. And some of them took training or read books on Power BI but got overwhelmed by the technical aspects.

Sadly, all the introductory Power BI books that have been published to date are tailored more toward technical individuals than business users. That's where this book comes in. This book is intended to get you started on your journey with Power BI in a way that teaches you the methods and principles that the IT professionals know but are simplified so that you don't feel like you're switching careers in learning this tool! If I had to use technical terminology in this book, I worked hard to make sure that I explained it in a way that anyone working in a business or organization could understand.

This book is intended to help guide you in the best ways to use Power BI to help you build sustainable tools for doing business analysis that, in turn, will lead to insights. That's my goal. I intentionally do not cover all the numerous bells and whistles, which continue to grow monthly. The concepts that you'll learn here have stayed the same since nearly the very beginning of Power BI. While Microsoft will continue improving this product, what you learn here will still apply for years to come.

You'll also learn to:
• Use the included and tested sample code to work through the helpful examples included by the author
• Conduct data orchestration and visualization to better understand and gain insights from your data

An essential resource for business analysts and Excel power users reaching the limits of that program's capabilities, Beginning Power BI for Business Users will also benefit data analysts who seek to prepare reports for their organizations using Microsoft's flexible and intuitive software.