Jeremey Arnold - Learning Microsoft Power Bi: Transforming Data Into Insights

• 2022-09-19: First Release

I was a senior at Ball State University when one of my professors, Dr. James McClure, and I were discussing classic challenges to the perfectly competitive market model. We were having a back-and-forth, and throughout our entire discussion, I kept bringing all the critiques back to a single problem: asymmetric information. Asymmetric information is the condition in which one party knows more about the topic at hand than the other party, to the point where they can use that for some sort of advantage.

We live in a world in which Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and others know so much about you that they can try to figure out what you want before you know you even want it. However, you have access to that same information. In the information age, we dont have an asymmetric information problem as much as we have an asymmetric comprehension problem. What we historically havent had is the ability to process data in the same way. Or at least, we didnt until recently.

Tools that would allow you to aggregate information at scale were historically tools of organizations that could afford complicated investments into data platforms that the ordinary person could neither comprehend nor afford. However, today there exists a piece of software that puts one of, if not the most powerful analytics engines ever made into your hands with an initial investment cost of zero dollars and zero cents. We have never been more awash in data, and that data is more available to people like you and me than it ever has been in human history.

Microsofts Power BI platform gives users a tool to aggregate incredibly large amounts of data to discover insights that can give you just as much, if not more, information than those around you. Whether you are using it for personal reasons or as an organization looking to get a competitive edge in the marketplace by making data more meaningful within your company, there has never been a lower-cost entry to data processing with the ease of use of Power BI Desktop.

Microsoft has spent years working with companies all over the world on a technology for complicated data analytics. Power BI is built on that technology, and Microsoft is literally putting all that know-how into your hands. Data is the great equalizer. Its not just about having more or less of it. Its about using the data you do have effectively.

Organizations all over the world collect more data than you and I could ever comprehend in a lifetime, and yet they do nothing with it because they have no idea how to use it, and they find themselves losing market share to smaller competitors who are using the data they have effectively. Nonprofits are using Power BI to do data analysis that makes the world a better place to live, on issues from conservation to climate change to healthcare access. Citizen data analysts are using publicly available datasets to uncover financial misbehavior and to double-check results from data provided by organizations and governments around the world. If the ability to process and make data meaningful is truly the great equalizer of the information age, then Power BI is a tool that gives you the ability to sit at a table and look giants in the eye.

You might be an accountant looking to automate complicated data cleaning processes for regulatory purposes and want a tool to quickly visualize profit and loss statements. You might be a citizen data analyst looking for a tool to help crunch millions of records of data for a personal project. You could be a data scientist looking for a tool to accelerate adoption of your work by end users. If you are a person who works with data in any capacity and want to get more out of that data than you ever have, then Power BI is an ecosystem that you should have exposure to.

I wrote this book because, first, Im super passionate about data being used effectively and I truly believe that everyone in the 21st century can interact with data in some way to improve, either professionally or personally. Second, Power BI has been a vehicle for me to better understand all sorts of important data concepts, and I think those ideas are important to accomplishing that first goal. How do we put data from different sources together? How do we deal with tables that are too large for Microsoft Excel? How do we target specific groups or slices of a group for analysis effectively? How do we visualize those results to make them comprehensible to our audience? My early career was spent deep in the bowels of corporate finance, and if I had Power BI then, I would have saved so much time and heartache in manually manipulating data and doing simple groupings and pivot tables.

Our 21st-century data requires a 21st-century tool to unlock it. I believe Power BI is the best tool to do that. It can store the data. It can analyze the data. It has the reach to be available to anyone who uses Windows. No other data visualization or exploration tool can make that claim, and thats why Im excited youre picking up this book. And I hope you find your data journey as fulfilling as mine has been and continues to be.