Learning objectives - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->In this lesson</v> line:15% we're going to learn about building visualizations line:15% and reports using the Power BI Desktop. This is really what ultimately sells Power BI. When people see Power BI for the first time, it's usually with some report or dashboard that is highly interactive and people are amazed and enthralled with just the level of interactivity that you can achieve with your data. So this is really some of the stuff that people get really excited about. We don't find people typically getting too excited about the data model. At the end of the day, I always like to use an analogy of a house. Nobody ever walks into a brand new house and says, "that's the most amazing plumbing or electrical I've ever seen in my life." They typically walk in and say, "I really like the flow. I like the colors. I like the decor. I love the way it's been staged." That's the front-end side of the work that we're going to focus on here in this particular lesson. It's what really sells Power BI, and it is the appeal of things. At the end of the day, without good quality data a pretty dashboard is going to have a very short life, anyhow. So you really need to ultimately have both. You need to have good quality data in the form of a data model, and you also need to be good at constructing stories that users can go ahead and digest. We're going to walk you through a lot of those techniques in this particular lesson. And it's really a next level of interactivity, and we want to teach you how to tell stories that go a long ways towards guiding your users through analytics. We're going to talk about bookmarks. And at the end of the day, a lot of this interactivity is still very new to a lot of people. I also believe that some of this interactivity is going to enable us as an industry to start moving away from traditional analytical means, which a lot of times, where people ask for tables of data and they want to scan through tables of data by hand or by printout, or maybe putting it into Excel Spreadsheet and doing some further analysis. With a lot of these techniques we're going to learn here in this particular lesson, you can pull a lot of that analytics and wrap those stories into Power BI. Make no mistake, it's a challenge. It is a bit of a change management issue. So ensure that you go through and educate your users on how to actually use the reports and dashboards you're going to create. So we'll talk about that as we go through this particular lesson as well. And the focus of this lesson here is really more around the things that are unique to Power BI that enable new and interesting ways of doing navigation, versus spending a lot of time building individual visualizations out and formatting them. I find that when teaching this class, most people are very familiar with building line charts and bar charts and doing formatting and stuff like that. From tool to tool to tool, they're quite similar in nature, but what makes Power BI really unique is a lot of the interactivity that you can do across reports and across your dashboard. So that's typically where we're going to focus in more in this particular lesson. Okay, so in terms of learning objectives, we're going to first teach you how to navigate the Power BI Desktop report view. We will want to get you comfortable with how to navigate the environment first, before we get going too far. We're going to then use a page background and theme which is gonna enable you to start bringing in corporate branding and corporate styles and logos and make things seem consistent and professional. So we think that's a really important first step in achieving dashboards and reports that people are really going to gravitate to and find appealing. We'll then talk about creating clustered column charts. We'll build a funnel chart. Then we're going to explore drill through, which is a technique in Power BI that lets you go from more high levels of information, to more detailed information that people are used to consuming. So we're going to teach you some of the ways to drill around your information. Next, we're going to build a line chart, and then we're going to show you how to drill down on that line chart. So drill down is another very useful and interesting feature inside of Power BI that lets you navigate data in different ways. Then we're going to use a card and KPI visualization. We'll talk about creating slicers. We're going to explore the filters pane. So the combination of the last two really allow you to start filtering and choosing data views the way that you want them to get them configured just right. So we'll talk a lot about slicers and filters. And that is it. So that is really the crux of this particular lesson. So let's go ahead and begin.