Course description

Spending hours every month copying exports into a spreadsheet report? Power BI can do the copying, cleaning and adding up for you, and turn the results into clear, interactive reports that update with one click. This course takes you from installing Power BI Desktop to sharing a finished report, one step at a time.

It's a full course, not a few quick tips. There are 10 sections and 50 written lessons, each with clear click-by-click steps, a worked example and a practical task. Every section has a practice pack with real-looking data to work on and model answers listing the exact numbers you should see, so you always know you've got it right. Throughout the course you follow Eleri, a sales and operations assistant at a small tea merchant, as she replaces a monthly spreadsheet report with a Power BI report.

What you'll learn

• Getting data in: Excel workbooks, CSV files and a whole folder of monthly files combined into one table.
• Power Query: removing junk rows, fixing UK dates, tidying text, unpivoting, merging and appending.
• Data models: fact and dimension tables, relationships and a proper date table.
• Visuals: choosing the right chart, cards, tables, matrices, formatting, slicers and filters.
• DAX: measures with SUM, DISTINCTCOUNT, DIVIDE, CALCULATE, SUMX and RELATED, then year to date, last year and rolling totals.
• Report design: planning, themes, accessibility, drill down, drillthrough, tooltips and bookmarks.
• Sharing: publishing to the Power BI service, workspaces, dashboards, safe sharing, exporting and refreshing.

Who this course is for

• Anyone who builds regular reports in Excel and wants to save time.
• Admin, sales, finance and operations staff, small business owners and charity staff.
• Job seekers who want a sought-after data skill on their CV.

You need a Windows computer: Power BI Desktop is free from Microsoft but runs on Windows only. The course finishes with a final project: you rebuild a full year-end sales report from the raw files.

What will i learn?

• Connect Power BI Desktop to Excel workbooks, CSV files and whole folders of files
• Clean and reshape messy data with Power Query, including UK dates
• Build a star-schema data model with relationships and a date table
• Choose and format the right visuals: charts, cards, tables, matrices and slicers
• Write DAX measures with SUM, DIVIDE, CALCULATE, SUMX and RELATED
• Compare periods with year to date, last year and rolling totals
• Design clear, accessible report pages with themes, drillthrough and bookmarks
• Publish, share and refresh reports safely in the Power BI service

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