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Power BI for beginners - our Get Started with Power BI training course

  in  Microsoft Power BI

Get Started with Power BI is our beginner’s Power BI training course. It is designed for people who have little or no experience with Microsoft Power BI.

The course is built around a series of hands-on report writing activities. Like all our Power BI courses, we put a lot of emphasis on practical, real-world activities in Power BI Desktop.

We also encourage delegates to give us examples of their data before the course. We can then adapt the course activities around that data - so we work together on Power BI reports that are more relevant.

A typical one day Get Started with Power BI training course would cover the following content:

  1. An introduction to Power BI Desktop.

  2. Importing data from Excel - formatting as Excel tables.

  3. Building a simple report - emphasis on using common visuals like slicers, matrices and charts.

    student dashboard training activity

  4. Solving problems with calculated columns.

  5. Using simple measures - an introduction to DAX.

  6. Building relationships between tables, the star schema and filter propagation.

  7. Using the online Power BI service to share reports with colleagues and teams.

What about prerequisites?

To get most value from the course you need to have reasonable MS Excel skills. It's not essential but it helps to know how to:

  1. Use basic formulas in Excel

  2. Convert tabular spreadsheet data into Excel ‘tables’.

  3. Filter columns, format data (numbers, text etc.).

  4. Create Excel columns that are based on formulas.

The course begins with a look at how data in MS Excel should be formatted before import in Power BI Desktop.

Can I bespoke the course?

Definitely. You'll get more out of the course if you've already started to think about the data you want to use with Power BI, the kind of data insights you are looking for and the audience/colleagues you want to share your reports with.

Tell us about your objectives when you book the course and we'll suggest a more bespoke approach. Better still if you can give us some data - anonymised in MS Excel is fine - because then we can prepare some more contextualised activities.

What does the Get Started with Power BI training day look like?

We do two versions of the basic course - one for education sector clients (mostly schools and colleges) and one for non-education clients. All clients get a similar apporach, we'll just change some of the activities where we can get industry relevant data.

Usually the day is built around 4 or 5 acitivites, each one introduces new ideas and a bit more complexity.

On the education version of the course we:

  1. Start with a MS Excel file of data about apprenticeship vacancies in England. This is publically available data. We format the data in Excel, import into Power BI and build a simple 3 page report. We add introduce calculated columns.

  2. Then a second report, this time with dummy student attendance data. We introduce basic measures - and use SUM, SUMX and CALCULATE.

  3. The third activity introduces relationships between tables and the importance of a star schema when working with data in Power BI.

  4. Then it's a bigger student dashboard activity - multiple tables, relationships, more measures and why time-series data needs a calendar/date table.

It's a full day, but the activities are designed to develop understanding in a structured way. And there are plenty of opportunites to ask questions and talk about your own data reporting needs.

Outcomes

At the end of the Get Started with Power BI training course you should be able to:

  1. Understand how to format data in MS Excel before importing it into Power BI.

  2. Design and build reports for a non-technical audience.

  3. Use calculated columns and measures to enhance your data and make reports more powerful.

  4. Share reports with colleagues via the Power BI online service.

You finish the course with the foundation you need to continue to develop your own skills.

How can I find out more?

Just click our Find Out More button and fill out the form. Or email Sheaf Digital at enquiries@sheafdigital.com


High Quality Microsoft Power BI Training Courses

Find out how to build and share reports. Courses for complete beginners take you through data preparation, data loading, report design and basic calculated columns and measures. Bespoke courses can use your own data.

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