Are you struggling to figure out Power BI?
When I moved into my first data analytics role, I didn’t know anything about Power BI. For the first few days, I began messing around with visuals and data connections, but nothing seemed to make sense. Even though I had experience in Excel, I had never learned Power Query, so the data manipulation side of Power BI was just as foreign as the visual editor. I was completely lost.
Power BI was the new Excel in this role, and I needed to figure it out fast.
In order to get good with Power BI, I had to figure a few things out:
- I needed to learn Power Query
- I needed to learn Visualizations (what good looked like)
- I needed to go deep on a topic
If this sounds like your situation, or you just want to level up your Power BI skills, let me save you some time and give you the recipe that allowed me to become a Power BI expert.
Thing #1: I needed to learn Power Query
I had no idea what I was doing in Power Query.
The key to understanding Power Query, for me, was:
Understanding Data Types
- After you’ve imported the data, go through each of the columns and make sure that the data was imported with the proper data type. When I first started with Power Query, I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting errors that ended up being data type mismatches or other data type issues.
Keeping Logic in the Data
- My instinct was to get the raw data into Power Query as fast as I could and then do all of the data transformations within Power Query. This was wrong. If you do the calculations/transformations in the base data (Excel/SQL), you’ll make transformation steps within Power Query much easier to follow (for yourself and others), replicate, and troubleshoot.
Having Power Query figured out was a huge time saver and made the following steps much easier.
Thing #2: I needed to learn Visualizations (what good looked like)
I had no idea what visualizations to learn or how to use them.
The most important part of learning visualizations is not to go through the list and learn all of the options available. You want to learn the visualizations that your company or your business uses most. Many people will be overwhelmed by all the options available, but I advise studying the most valuable and most used dashboards and visualizations and replicating them or learning from the people who made them. Once you are able to recreate what good looks like, you can overdeliver and add more.
Creating dashboards and visualizations that were useful and insightful skyrocketed my knowledge and usefulness in Power BI.
Thing #3: I needed to go deep on a topic
I could recreate what other people had done, but I hadn’t done anything new or creative myself.
I’ve found that going deep into a detailed area of anything I’m trying to learn differentiates me as an expert in that area and completely amplifies my learning in surrounding areas within that topic. In Power BI, I chose Toggles. Toggles are buttons that can change what visuals are shown or how the data is filtered. Through learning toggles, I was able to learn about bookmarks, buttons, filters, slicers, and more on the power query side. It doesn’t have to be Toggles, but going deep into some area of Power BI will accelerate your learning overall.
By doing these 3 things, I became an expert in Power BI
If you do the work in Power BI, by the end, you’ll be a data guru and an expert storyteller.