Power BI Essential Skills

Build Practical Data Analysis and Visualisation Skills with Power BI

This practical one-day course introduces the essential skills needed to work confidently in Power BI Desktop, Power Query Editor and the Power BI web service. You will learn how to import, clean and combine data from multiple sources, create relationships between data tables, build basic calculations and create interactive visualisations.

Whether you are new to Power BI or building on existing data skills, this course helps you develop practical reporting and dashboard skills you can apply in a workplace context.

Power BI Essential Skills is ideal for people who:

• Analysts, managers, data scientists and anyone who wants to visualise data and gain actionable insights, including people new to Power BI
• Need to import, clean, model and visualise data as part of their role
• Want to create reports and dashboards using Power BI
• Need to combine data from multiple sources for analysis
• Want to use Power BI to support clearer workplace reporting and decision-making

To attend Power BI Essential Skills, you should:

• Be familiar with working with data
• Ideally have experience with datasets containing more than one related table
• Ideally understand Excel formulas, tables, PivotTables and charts

After completing Power BI Essential Skills, you will be able to:

• Navigate Power BI Desktop, Power Query Editor and the Power BI web service
• Import, clean and combine data from multiple sources
• Create relationships between data tables
• Build calculations and interactive visualisations
• Publish, share and refresh reports and dashboards

Introduction to Power BI

• Explore Power BI Desktop, Power Query Editor and the Power BI web service
• Import data from a range of sources
• Detect relationships between tables

Preparing and Combining Data

• Discover, combine and shape data from multiple sources
• Clean queried data in Power Query Editor
• Merge columns and append batches of data

Building the Data Model

• Create one-to-many relationships between tables
• Create calculated columns with Power Query Editor
• Review the Power BI data model

DAX and Measures

• Use DAX to generate new columns
• Perform basic summarisations

Visualising and Exploring Data

• Create interactive visualisations
• Sort months and days in a logical order
• Filter, slice and drill down through data
• Plot data on New Zealand maps

Publishing and Dashboards

• Publish content to the Power BI web service
• Create dashboards

Sharing and Data Refresh

• Share reports and dashboards
• Refresh data so current information is displayed