In today's fast-paced, high-tech, competitive business environment, analytics, data visualization and Business Intelligence (BI) are the hot topics many firms and professional recruiters seek. Increasingly, organizations of all sizes are seeking to take advantage of the vast data available to them to identify previously undiscovered insights and gain competitive advantages.  The premier tool for this, especially since the sale of Tableau, is MS Power BI - Excel’s big brother - on steroids!

These “big data” desk-top tools were out-of-reach just a few short years ago. Today Microsoft Desktop Power BI is free. The cloud-based Power BI Pro service costs a small business $10 per month and is used by Fortune 1000 firms on an enterprise-wide basis at extremely competitive prices.

If you understand Excel charts and have an overview of Pivot Tables then you can leverage your existing knowledge and skills to create powerful, interactive dashboards and analyses unthinkable until recently. This 90-minute webinar takes you from Excel Dashboards to easier and more powerful MS Power BI dashboards. With this training you’ll learn the basics of implementing "do it yourself business intelligence" using Power BI. 

Over the last few years, data has become the lifeblood of organizations. Those organizations that harness the power of big data business intelligence (BI) realize tangible competitive advantages. MS Power BI allows mangers to rely less on the IT department and achieve more self-service, control, agility and focused business intelligence (BI) using both the data warehouse and outside sources.  With MS Power BI you can easily manipulate several databases. MS Power BI is easy, fast, and free.

Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service that gives you a single view of your most critical business data. Monitor the health of your business using a live dashboard, create rich interactive reports with Power BI Desktop.

The top BI trends include:

• Data literacy becomes a fundamental skill of the future
• Modern BI such as Power BI becomes the new normal
• Advanced analytics becomes more accessible
• Those versatile in using big data analytics in conjunction with professional-level data visualizations for business intelligence decision making will have a path to the future
• In 2015 Microsoft introduced Power BI in its current form. Microsoft’s major BI competitor, Tableau, saw their stock price fall 50% within three months. Three years later Tableau was sold to another firm. Today Microsoft Power BI dominates the BI software market. Now you can learn the essential basics of MS Power BI  in just 90 minutes.

Introduction to Power BI Desktop

• Downloading the Power BI Desktop for Free
• Desktop Summary - Three Different Views and What They Do
• An Overview of the Workflow in Power BI Desktop 
• Dashboard in Minutes - Overview

Loading the Data Model - Connecting Power BI Desktop to Data Sources 

• Connecting to Excel Data Sources 
• Connecting to CSV and text files 
• Connecting to a Folder of data 
• Connecting to a web URL 

Introduction to the Query Editor Interface: Editing Data

• Cleaning up and transforming data 
• Establishing Headers and Removing rows 
• Editing and Renaming Rows and Columns
• Rearranging columns 
• Creating custom columns 
• Trim and Clean 
• Replacing Values 
• Splitting columns 
• Pivoting and Unpivoting Columns 

Understanding Database Relationships: Power BI Data Modeling

• The Data Model: Data & Relationship Power BI Desktop View 
• Adding Databases and Connecting Data Model Relationships 
• Creating Relationships Automatically and Manually
• Primary Key, Foreign Keys and Index Columns 
• Understanding Cardinality: Many to Many and One to Many Relationships
• Creating DIM and FACT Table(s) 
• Introducing the Star Schema 
• Creating a date table - date/time intelligence

Modeling with Power BI Desktop

• Formatting Data 
• Performing Basic Mathematical Operations 
• DAX: Creating Calculated Columns and Measures
• Using time intelligence functions 
• Formatting Dates 
• Using the SUMX function 

Power BI Desktop Report View:  Creating Interactive Visualizations/Dashboards

• Walkthrough of Available Charts
• Creating Your First Visualizations 
• Data, Format and Analytics Controls
• Creating Column, Bar and Line Charts 
• Aggregating Data: Default Summarization & Sorting
• Grouping data 
• Reference/Constant Lines
• Stacked and 100% Graphs 
• Formatting, Colors, Charts and Sorting 
• Tables, Matrices & Conditional Formatting
• Trend Analysis Graphs - Analytics
• Cards, Multi-Row Cards, Gauges, Targets and KPIs
• Scatterplots and Bubble plots
• Scatter & Bubble Charts & Play Axis
• Map Visualizations
• Adding Color Saturation 
• Tree map v. Pie or Donut (Desert) Charts 
• Creating/Managing Hierarchies Including Date Hierarchies and Drill-Down /Up
• Cross Filtering and Highlighting
• Visual, Page and Report Level Filters
• Creating Slicers & Timeline Slicers
• Backgrounds, logos and images 
• Customizing Tooltip Messages
• The Quick Calc Option 
• Downloading Custom Visuals and Slicers