Introduction - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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line:15% <v ->Hello, and welcome to this live lesson</v> line:15% in which I'll introduce you to Microsoft Power BI. line:15% My name is Chris Sorensen. For the past 20 years, I've been involved in data analytics in both a business and technical capacity. Currently, I'm the President of Iteration Insights, a Calgary based analytics consulting firm. From a training and education background perspective, I'm a Chartered Professional Accountant, in Canada. I'm a Microsoft Certified Trainer. And I'm Microsoft Certified as a Data Analyst Associate. In my current role I'm an architect, coach, trainer, speaker, and author. In 2018 I had the pleasure of publishing, analyzing, and visualizing data with Microsoft Excel for Microsoft Press. And more recently, we launched a Microsoft Press video course called Data Analysis Fundamentals with Excel. In addition to this, I'm a community leader in the Business Applications and Azure suite of products. Here in Calgary, we run both a Power platform user group and an Azure Analytics user group. And we're really proud of our community involvement. I will be your guide as we explore and introduce you to Power BI. In my current role, I'm heavily involved in enabling organizations to become more data-driven. You'll be hard pressed to find an organization this day and age that does not wanna become more data-driven. The big question is, how do we get there? As you might imagine, this involves much more than implementing technologies alone. At the ground level, it really starts with producing reliable data, which can be later consumed by analytic applications, like Power BI, to produce an accurate and timely picture of business performance. So let's step back and talk about some of the things that will help orient in this course as a lot of elements went into planning this out. First, let's talk about our target audience. So this course is for anyone in an organization that delivers analytic insights as part of their job. And this is almost everyone in an organization. It is primarily aimed at business users as this is where the majority of analysis is done. And as such, the course is paced and explained in this manner. I take great pride in being able to convey technical concepts to various users across many different organizations. So we've really reduced the technical jargon, and made no assumptions around IT and technical background. That being said, if you're an IT user that is new to Power BI, or perhaps you've dabbled in it, this course is for you as well. From a prerequisites and prior experience standpoint, we think that it's helpful if you have a sense of how business questions are asked and how they're answered, so understanding the flow of delivery across analytics. However, this is not required, as we're gonna use role-playing and tell a story to help you understand these concepts. You might be a seasoned business person, or a recent graduate, either way, this course is for everyone. So the core style. You'll learn the core piece of Power BI in a front to back manner. And my goal is to expose you to the most widely used functions and feature in Power BI, and explain why something is used via storytelling. And most importantly, I wanna give you the confidence to navigate and build rich and powerful Power BI solutions quickly and efficiently. And to me, confidence is the big one. Because sometimes this can be a bit of a change management issue. A lot of times we get used to doing things a certain way in our existing reporting tools, and we find it hard to move over to something new, I wanna be able to break down those barriers for you. And sometimes we just need to break down that barrier and help people overcome the fear of trying something new, and keep them from defaulting to back to what they know. And you might be saying to yourself, "I'm really good at using Excel, why do I need to use this tool?" And there will be an undercurrent of how Excel and Power BI are better together. Either way, I wanna say for success, and help you rise up as a feature expert in Power BI. And this is just the first step in that journey. It's a long journey, but a fun journey, and I really wanna help you down that path. So how long is this course? The goal was to make this digestible by fitting it into one workday. So depending on how fast you go, or how well you absorb concepts, we really tried to fit this into one day. So with that one day parameter, we needed to make some tough choices. As to what to actually include in the course and what not to include in the course, 'cause there's lots to talk about in Power BI. And it's not easy, but based on my training of over 1000 users in Power BI over the past five years, I feel like I hit the mark, but you get to be the judge of that. There will always be something that we will miss, or something we don't cover that's beyond the scope of this class and that's just the nature of the beast. So what we did was we really tried to figure out, what was gonna fit into that one day, and what was gonna give you the best impact, so that when you went out and started using Power BI, you felt confident about doing it. So the course style. So this is really built around a story. I do strongly recommend that you do each sublesson within a lesson sequentially. So go front to back in the actual exercises. The lessons also follow a sequence, so the recommendation is to go sequentially to match the flow of analytics, which we're gonna talk about in lesson number one. But they can be done in whatever order you want, ultimately. Because each lesson will have supporting PBX files that you can use to jump in at any spot if you want. So if there's a technique you want to go back and review, you can go back and review it, and pick up on the PDF file that supports it and go from there. So it's really up to you to decide how you want to do this. And finally, why would you take this course over others? We think it's because we focus this around real world examples and really focus in on why you're doing things. And what's some of the good habits are to get into right out of the gate. We've had an experience training wide ranges of people that are very technical, very business oriented and come from various backgrounds in businesses. So we really take that and really try and help you along that way. And most importantly, I actively use these tools and can give you that real world experience. And right now I'm going to issue a challenge. And I issues this challenge before you start because I want you to think about what is that application that you're gonna build first, once you finished this class? So you may have an existing reporting application that maybe wanna port over to power BI, maybe you have a brand new idea. Either way, it's really helpful if you have a business question or something you wanna do either along with this class or once you're finished because once you do this, ideally you get in to start getting into the mix right off the bat. So you can start using these new tools and tips and techniques right away. So your memory doesn't fade on what they'll look like. So the scenario we're gonna use in this course is a seemingly simple question, in that we are a brand new employee, but venture like cycle and the CEO has come to you and said the following: I want to understand our organizational sales by sales territories, order dates and products. And I recently had a really good demo on Power BI and I'd like you to deliver all this information through Power BI itself. So you go ahead and pick up this challenge. And what we're gonna do is take that business question that was given to you by the CEO and walk you through step-by-step of how we're gonna acquire data, cleanse data, get your data ready for reporting and then build some reports and then ultimately deliver those reports out to your consumers. So we're gonna go front to back and show you all the key areas of Power BI than other important in being able to satisfy this particular request. Sounds simple, right? So, that's really about it. We're really excited to teach you this class, we're really excited to get you moving along this journey, so let's go ahead and get into it. But first, before we do that, let's go ahead and take a look at our learning objectives. So in lesson number one, we're gonna focus on getting started with Power BI. I wanna get you set up and oriented around Power BI, the ecosystem, the tools, the terminology, licensing and things like that, so that's the focus of lesson number one. In lesson, number two, we're gonna work on importing and transforming data using the power query editor. So we're gonna acquire data, cleanse it and get it ready for reporting. In lesson number three, the focus is really around building a data model that's gonna support self-service reporting. So we're gonna spend a lot of time discussing that. In lesson number four, this is what people really get excited about when it comes to Power BI. Is we're gonna develop reports and visualizations using the Power BI desktop. Lesson number five, we're gonna talk about enhancing the experience using the Power BI service. So after we've taken our work on the desktop and we publish in the Power BI service, how do we actually go in and enhance that information? And lastly, in lesson six, we're gonna talk about securing, sharing and collaborating using the Power BI service. So lots to talk about, lots to learn, as mentioned we're really excited to get you on the path towards becoming proficient and expert inside a Power BI. Let's begin.