While one of the newer tools in the analytics toolkit (it’s not even 10 years old), Power BI has certainly made its mark on the landscape. I consider Power BI to be in the (no surprise by the name) BI and reporting slice of the data analytics stack, and a good analyst knows a bit of each slice. Because Power BI is a Microsoft product, it makes sense especially for current Excel users to pick up this skill.
If you’re plodding along with Excel for all your dashboards and reports (well, maybe you’ve got a reservation or two), you might be asking: what the heck is this for? Fortunately, these two tools are totally complementary and there’s no reason to throw out your Excel skills for Power BI. (In fact, spreadsheets in general remain an important slice of the data analytics stack.)
To make things really interesting, Power BI and Excel share some functionality: namely in the Power Pivot and Power Query tools for data modeling and transformation, respectively. There are also growing integrations between Excel and Power BI. However, as many of us already know — not everything should be in Excel, and it has its weaknesses. Power BI can help with building more robust, dynamic, distributable dashboards and reports.
This 30-day checklist serves as an introduction to Power BI for analysts who are working largely in Excel and would like to see what Power BI is capable of. You will learn things like:
- How Excel and Power BI compare, and when to use which
- How to work with the Power BI Desktop interface
- The basics of data cleaning with Power Query
- The basics of data modeling with Power Pivot and DAX
- How to build dashboards and visualizations
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I also hope with this checklist you become acquainted with the fantastic Power BI community and some of the best content they’ve made available for free.
Happy working through the checklist, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you get up to with Power BI. Please share any of your favorite resources below. Got questions? I’ll take those too 😉.
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