The most important part of any reporting project is the integration and preparation of the source data to be reported on. If we put bad data in, we get bad information out! Developing Power Bi reports and dashboards comprises of three main stages: Data Cleansing & Preparation, Tabular Data Modelling, and Building Visualisations.
Building visualisations ("the pretty bits"), although often time consuming, is not generally where most man hours go when new report specification requests are submitted. The bulk of the man hours will go on preparing the source data so that it is a reliable, quality and suitable format for reporting on.
Data comes in all shapes and sizes, some tidy, some not tidy, some tabular, some not tabular. We find that there are spelling mistakes, inconsistent date formats, missing values, error values, values out of bounds. Some data sources, particularly Excel and Text type sources, may include several different sets of data and several different data layouts in one file. We may find some data sources have no unique identifiers making it very difficult to reference records when reporting.
These are just a few of the challenges facing us when we are asked to create a new report. Power BI provides an extremely powerful set of data import, cleansing, transformation and shaping tools to address all of these problems. They come in the form of Query Editor (or PowerQuery).
This 2 day course focuses on the Data Cleansing & Preparation stage of Power BI development, and delves into the depths of the Query Editor and introduces you to the more advanced tools available to assist with preparing your data so that is fit to report on. It will also take you to the next level of data mashup and transformation with an introduction to M Script and R Script for more complex, out of the ordinary, transformation needs.
It is a hands-on course with plenty of realistic labs and data challenges to prepare you for solving your own source data quality issues.
The next stage on from this course would be our Advanced Tabular Modelling With Power BI course.