What Is the Best Way to Learn Power BI?
As a data professional looking to advance your career, you have to familiarize yourself with Power BI. This means that you have to undergo Power BI training and be certified by Microsoft. Fortunately, you can now have your Power BI training online.
But when did Power BI come out? What is the best way to learn Power BI, and is learning Power BI worth it? These are important queries that every data professional must find answers to before they start their training. This article discusses the most effective way to learn Power BI.
What Is Power BI?
Power BI is a business intelligence platform developed by Microsoft to provide data professionals and business managers with tools for collecting, cleansing, visualizing, scrutinizing, and sharing data. Its user interface is quite friendly and intuitive, making it easy for users with knowledge of Excel.
Power BI’s deep integration with several other products from Microsoft makes it quite adaptable. It’s a self-service data tool that can easily be used by novices with the right training. The software is compatible with Windows and virtual devices. If your company wants to keep its data and published reports within its premises, you can use the Power BI Report Server.
How to Learn Power BI
Because the main aim of learning Power BI is to get certified by Microsoft so that you can be more competitive in the job market, you need to take the training seriously. You have to follow all the necessary steps in this training, making sure that you master every aspect of Power BI.
Once you’ve gone through the entire training process, you’ll easily take the PL-300 certification exam and pass. Here are the main steps you have to take to learn Microsoft Power BI:
Familiarizing Yourself with the User Interface
The first thing you need to do when learning Power BI is to understand its user interface. Because this data tool is free to download, you can easily get it from Microsoft. Once you’ve successfully installed the program on your device, take time to go through the main aspects of the user interface.
However, don’t spend a lot of time studying the interface. You just need to understand the basic features and functions that you need to navigate the interface easily–learn the basics and start working with real data right away.
Creating Your Visualizations
Once you’re familiar with the user interface, start developing visualizations in the Report View. You should do this using clean data sets because you won’t have to do a lot of modeling or data cleansing. That way, you can learn how to import data and create reports.
Modeling and Cleaning Data
Although you should use clean data sets to create your visualizations during training, ultimately you have to learn how to model and clean data. So, once you’ve understood how to create visualizations, you should do more complicated analysis with this data tool by designing data models and calculating values.
Use DAX to calculate values and Power Query Editor to clean your data. While these features may appear intricate at first, you’ll eventually figure out how to deploy them in real-life data modeling and cleansing situations.
Publishing Reports
In a realistic job setting, you’ll be expected to share your data analysis results across different departments for decision-making. Therefore, you need to learn how to publish your reports using the Power BI service. You start by creating the report in Power BI Desktop and then publish it to the Power BI service.
Once the report is successfully published, share it with your colleagues. To practice this, you have to sign up for the Power BI Service tool and familiarize yourself with the interface.
Building Your Project Portfolio
The final step in your Power BI training is using the skills you’ve acquired to create an end-to-end workflow. This will help you to put your skills to use and build a project portfolio that you can use to convince potential employers to hire you!
