Power BI 2-Day Intensive Course Outline
Power BI is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) platform, designed to help users connect to and visualize data from various sources, transforming it into interactive, shareable, and insightful reports and dashboards.
It includes tools like Power BI Desktop for report creation, a cloud-based Power BI service for sharing and collaboration, and features for data modeling, cleaning, and using artificial intelligence to uncover patterns.
The platform enables businesses to analyze data, gain actionable insights, and make more informed decisions.
Welcome & Setup
- Introduction to Power BI and its components
- Installing Power BI Desktop
- Interface walkthrough
Getting & Transforming Data
- Connecting to Excel, CSV, and web data sources
- Power Query basics
- Data cleaning: removing errors, changing types, filtering
- Merging and appending queries
- Hands-On Lab: Import and clean a sales dataset
Data Modeling Essentials
- Data model structure (star vs snowflake)
- Creating relationships between tables
- Calculated columns vs measures
- Basic DAX (SUM, COUNT, CALCULATE)
- Exercise: Build a sales model with calculated fields
Data Visualization Basics
- Bar, column, pie, line, and card visuals
- Slicers and filters
- Drill-down, sorting, and grouping
- Customizing visual interactions
- Hands-On Lab: Create an interactive sales dashboard
Dashboard Design Best Practices
- Layout and consistency
- Colors, fonts, and themes
- Bookmarks and buttons for navigation
- Responsive design
Advanced DAX & Time Intelligence
- Measures recap
- Using CALCULATE with FILTER
- Time-based functions: YTD, MTD, Previous Period
- Variables in DAX
- Exercise: Create YTD, LY, and growth metrics
Power BI Service & Sharing
- Publishing to Power BI Service
- Workspaces vs dashboards
- Data refresh setup
- Sharing reports securely
- Lab: Publish and share a dashboard with RLS setup
Row-Level Security & Governance
- Define roles and security rules
- Test RLS in Power BI Desktop
- Permissions and user roles in the Service
- Exercise: Apply RLS to your report
Real-World Case Study Project
- Hands-on: Build a mini-dashboard using provided dataset
- Apply: data import, modeling, visuals, DAX, RLS
- Optional: Group or individual presentations