Adam Aspin - Pro Power BI Dashboard Creation: Building Elegant and Interactive Dashboards with Visually Arresting Analytics

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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Business intelligence (BI) is a concept that has been around for many years. Until recently, it has too often been a domain reserved for large corporations with teams of dedicated IT specialists. All too frequently, this has meant developing complex solutions using expensive products on timescales that did not meet business needs. All this has changed with the advent of self-service business intelligence.

Now a user with a reasonable knowledge of Microsoft Office can leverage their skills to produce their own analyses with minimal support from central IT. Then they can deliver their insights to colleagues safely and securely via the cloud. This democratization has been made possible by a superb free product from MicrosoftPower BI Desktopthat revolutionizes the way in which data is discovered, captured, structured, and shaped so that it can be sliced, diced, chopped, queried, and presented in an interactive and intensely visual way.

Power BI Desktop provides you with the capability to analyze and present your data and to shape and deliver your results easily and impressively. All this can be achieved in a fraction of the time that it would take to specify, develop, and test a corporate solution. To cap it all off, self-service BI with Power BI Desktop lets you produce reports at a fraction of the cost of more traditional solutions, with far less rigidity and overhead.

The first explains how to extend Power BI by melding disparate data sources into a unified data model that you then extend using DAXthe built-in analytics language. The second guides you through the process of ingesting, cleansing, and shaping source datasets to underpin your dashboard creation.

Although a basic knowledge of the MS Office suite will help, this book presumes that you have little or no knowledge of Power BI Desktop. This product is therefore explained from the ground up with the aim of providing the most complete coverage possible of the way in which its components work together to deliver user-driven dashboards. Hopefully, if you read the book and follow the examples given, you will arrive at a level of practical knowledge and confidence that you can subsequently apply to your own dashboard requirements. This book should prove invaluable to business intelligence developers, MS Office power users, IT managers, and finance expertsindeed anyone who wants to deliver efficient and practical business intelligence to their colleagues. Whether your aim is to develop a proof of concept or to deliver a fully-fledged BI system, this book can, hopefully, be your guide and mentor.

This book comes with a small sample dataset that you can use to follow the examples that are provided. It may seem paradoxical to use a tiny data sample when explaining a product suite that is capable of analyzing medium and large datasets. However, I prefer to use an extremely simplistic data structure so that the reader is free to focus on the essence of what is being explained and not the data itself.

Inevitably, not every question can be answered and not every issue can be resolved in one book. I truly hope that I have answered many of the essential Power BI questions that you will face when developing dashboards. Equally, I hope that I have provided ways of solving a reasonable number of the challenges that you may encounter. I wish you good luck in using Power BI Desktop to prepare and deliver your insights. And I sincerely hope that you have as much fun with it as I had writing this book.