What I learnt from my Power BI Training

I was a little tentative going into the class not having used Power BI before but I was surprised how familiar it felt after the first few minutes.

The Power BI Beginner Course is an excellent introduction to Power BI. What I learned straight away was that BI stands for Business Intelligence. This is where Power BI really sets itself apart by providing insights about data that can drive business decisions.

The course delved into creating datasets (models) from one/multiple data sources to create a data model. We then created reports containing visualisations of the model. This included using maps, a wide range of charts, tables and gauges. Following this we learned how to share the reports through Dashboards and finally how to interact with Reports and Dashboards through the cloud based service - we even saw how easy it was on a phone/tablet.

If you have a beginner or intermediate understanding of Excel, the functionality of Power BI is straight forward.

So, although it may be a new program it still seems familiar.

The Power BI training course goes through the process of importing data and creating visualisations to share the story of the important findings of the business. It was great to see how you can demonstrate this data in some very unique ways. In fact, the program is intelligent enough to pick up on trends that it sees. And you can even ask it to find trends that exist (somewhere) in the data.

The course also goes over the functionality of the Desktop version and Service or cloud-based version of Power BI. The difference being in the Desktop version you can really get in and 'clean' the data to ensure what you import is usable. Where as the Service version is where you can create and 'play' with the visualisations and finally share them.

Overall, Power BI allows for business monitoring, getting answers quickly with rich dashboards that are available on every device. End-users get instant access to real-time data with visualisations that can also be shared. It's a useful program and app that continues to evolve and get better by the day. The online community surrounding Power BI offering assistance is also very up to date and helpful.

Our Power BI Intermediate course is now live! Bolster your resume with a Power BI certification to make you stand out.