Course summary

This one-day Power BI training course will provide you with the skills to navigate and retrieve the business intelligence within existing reports and datasets. Within your browser you'll learn how to filter report pages to gain insights from key influencers and how to collaborate in the Power BI Service to query your team’s data and reveal informative stats and trends that you can pin to the team’s dashboards. Finally, we'll show you how to extract and export the results of your analysis in a variety of secure formats.

Aims

We want to equip you with knowledge and skills to analyse, interpret and work with existing Power BI models, reports and dashboards. You'll learn to navigate, filter and extract business intelligence from your team’s visuals and datasets. You'll also learn how to collaborate with your colleagues and analysts to easily and efficiently produce new visuals within your team’s workspace.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• view and navigate the Power BI Service reports, datasets, dashboards and apps
• comprehend and interpret a variety of report visuals
• filter, focus and bookmark targeted insights and influencers
• drill down and drill through visual hierarchies
• extract and export queries and insights
• query your dashboards with efficient Q&A vocabulary
• share and collaborate on the results of your analysis.

Content

Get Started with the Power BI Service

• Opening and Navigating the Power BI Service
• Accessing and understanding Workspaces
  • Recognising Roles and Permissions
  • Viewing Reports
  • Viewing Datasets and Lineage
  • Viewing Dashboards
• Accessing and understanding Apps

Working with Reports and Dashboards

Navigating

• Resizing the Report on screen
• Navigating Pages
• Using Bookmarks
• Spotlight Visuals
• Reset the Report
• Refresh the Data

Interpreting Visuals and Insights

• Column, Bar and Line Charts
• Waterfall, Funnel and Scatter Charts
• Pie, Donut and Treemap Charts
• Gauge, KPI and Decomposition Visuals

Highlighting and Retrieving Data

• Understand and use Tooltips
• Best practices when selecting visuals
• Sort Tables and Chart Axis’
• Focus Mode
• Show as Table
• Get Insights
• Key Influencers
• Smart Narratives
• Pin Visuals and Pages to a Dashboard

Filtering

• Cross filtering between visuals
• Slicers, including synchronised slicers
• Page filters
• Basic, Advanced and Top N filtering
• Drill Down and Drill Through

Collaborating, Sharing and Exporting

• Add Comments
• Subscribe
• Chat in Teams
• Export Visual to CSV
• Save and/or download the Report
• Embed the Report in SharePoint and Teams
• Export Report to PowerPoint; static or live
• Export to PDF
• Analyse in Excel and Pivot
• Generate QR Code

Effective use of Q&A to generate Business Intelligence

• Use Q&A Suggestions
• Ask questions using key words
• Filter and edit Q&A results
• Pin visual results to a Dashboard

Editing

• Format existing Visuals and Pages
• Create and manage new Pages
• Add New Visuals
• Understand and apply prebuilt Measures to Visuals
• Apply prebuilt Hierarchies to Visuals; including Date Hierarchies
• Format new Visuals and Pages
• Add Custom Visuals
• Add Filters and Slicers
• Add Bookmarks
• Add Titles; including Page Titles
• Understand graphical excellence

Working with Datasets

• Create formatted Tables
  • Add Fields
  • Summarise Fields
  • Format the Tables
  • Save and Export
• Create New Reports
• Connect Power BI Desktop to Live Dataset

Who this course is for

• Analysts and users who ‘consume’ data and reports (but are not necessarily modelling or building reports).
• Managers, Directors, Executives and Assistants
• Financial Forensic Specialists
• Social Media Analysts
• Sales and Marketing Professionals

Prerequisites

No prior knowledge of programming languages is required. However, you'll a need a basic level of Excel expertise to comfortably participate in this course. Please refer to Microsoft Excel Course: Level 1 and make sure you can complete at least 80% of the learning outcomes.

Materials

A course workbook is distributed electronically using Dropbox.

What you need to do before the course

For this course, you will need Microsoft Power BI installed on your device. You will be provided with a login to Power BI pro – the cloud application. However, you can choose to use your own Power BI pro license if you have one.

• Required operating system: Windows (please note Power BI does not run on MacOS)
• Required software: Microsoft Power BI (latest version is recommended, but the minimum version required is July 2022)

Face-to-face classes (CCE, Sydney)

Classes are held in a computer lab. You do not need to bring your own device or login details.

Online classes

For the best experience, we recommend using a computer with a large monitor or dual screens/devices. Small laptop screens can make it difficult to follow the facilitator’s display while working in the software.

Course Brochure