Step by Step Guide to Learn Power BI – for Beginners
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Data Science and Analytics is a speedily growing field. Also, the demand for professionals in this domain is increasing. There are dozens of tools available in the market to make the process of data analyzing easier. Many a times it is difficult for professionals to decide, which tool to master and even if they choose a tool to master, they don’t find any step-by-step complete guide. This particular article is going to focus on how to learn Power Bi, a data analytics and visualization tool by Microsoft.
What is Power BI?
As the name ‘Power Bi’ itself suggest, this tool is a powerful drag and drop tool for Business Intelligence. Microsoft claims it as ‘collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.’ This tool allows all the non-technical professional to aggregate, visualize, analyze and share the data. No wonder, why Power BI is the most preferred tool in business world.
Importance of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence can be considered as a process to extract relevant data from various sources and generating insights that could help various pillars of any business-like HR, Marketing, Sales and Operations. Business Intelligence can help you build relevant smart plans to chase your organization goals.
In practice, you’ve got contemporary business intelligence when you have a holistic perspective of your company’s data and can utilize it to drive change, reduce inefficiencies, and swiftly adjust to market or supplier changes. Business Intelligence can be considered as an umbrella term which may include many features like data mining, reporting, performance metrics and benchmarking, descriptive analytic, querying, statistical analysis, data preparation and data visualization. Understanding all the terms mentioned ahead will help us to understand the process of generating Business Intelligence.
- Data mining is the process of discovering patterns in massive datasets using databases, statistics, and machine learning.
- Reporting: Stakeholders are presented with data analysis so that they may draw conclusions and make decisions.
- Performance metrics and benchmarking: Using customized dashboards to compare current performance data to previous data in order to measure performance versus goals.
- Descriptive analytics is the process of determining what happened based on basic data analysis.
- Querying: Inquiring about particular data and having BI get the responses from the databases.
- Statistical analysis: Taking the results of descriptive analytics and utilizing statistics to further investigate the data, such as how and why this pattern occurred.
- Data visualization is the process of transforming data analysis into visual representations like charts, graphs, and histograms so that it may be consumed more readily.
- Visual analysis: Using visual storytelling to explore data and express findings
Step by Step Process to learn Power BI
Now that it is very clear that how important business intelligence and their tools like power BI are let’s understand the process of business intelligence. These are the same steps that you are required to master one by one to figure out insights from raw data in power bi.
Extract is the process in which data is extracted from various data sources like excel, dataverse, sql server, power bi datasets, power bi dataflow, OData feed, csv etc. Transform is the process in which data is converted in the format that fulfills operational and analytical requirements of business. During load the data is moved to central data repository. All the above-mentioned processes are also called as ETL (Extract-Transfer-Load) process.
In Data modelling a data model is created for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. DAX is the process in which several calculations are implied on data. Once the calculation is completed and final output is ready, report is built and published. DAX Power BI is very important skillset and can be a factor whether a person is begineer or pro.
After everything is complete you can build a visualization to present the analysis in front of stakeholders in an appealing manner. Dashboard could be easily shared with stakeholders and are always easy to understand. Dashboard visualizations look easy to build but it generally requires good knowledge about graphs, charts and colors.
It is really important to understand Power BI architecture with working, which will help us to know how various components communicate. By now you might be clear regarding what all processes you should master in order to be a Power BI master.
Potential
- It’s easy to use.
- Allows you to access over 70 data connectors.
- Power Bi allows you to track users and control data usage.
- It also allows to store your data on Microsoft cloud or behind your company firewall.
- Power BI is scalable so it can match with business requirements maybe it is rapid growth or downsizing.
- Power BI uses popular Office 365 platform, so you can use office 365’s interface to build implementations.
- It allows you to share data.
- Power BI offers interactive visual dashboards.
- Users can pull – process and share real-time data anytime anywhere.
Power BI Jobs
Many companies in various industries like healthcare, IT, insurance, financial services, agriculture, staffing and recruiting use power bi extensively to improve their businesses using insights. Some of the job roles that ask for power bi as a skill are Business Analyst, Data Analyst, Power BI developer, Senior Software engineer and other managerial positions that require frequent decision making.
When we are writing this article there are more than 37,000 jobs in United States and more than 5000 jobs in India that require power bi as a skill. And also, as per Glassdoor the average salary of Power Bi professional in India is 582,000 rupees and in United States it is $81,514 a year. So, whether you are fresher or lateral power bi can be extremely useful skill for you.
Resources to learn Power BI
As power bi tool is very much required in most of the organizations the educational resources are available on internet in good amount, but not all of them provide that quality. Below are some of the suggestions from our side
- Microsoft Power Bi documentation
- Microsoft Power Bi Webinars
- Microsoft Power Bi YouTube videos
- The MachineLearningTutor way (Inquire to know about our upcoming courses)
There are many skills that one needs to be relevant in the market, Power BI alone will not work. For example – if you are looking for analyst job then you need to have good communication skills and presentation skills along with analyst core skills.