PL 300

The parts of Power BI

Power BI Service Power BI Desktop Power BI mobile

Manage

Power BI consists of many components, including reports, dashboards, workspaces, datasets, and more. As a data analyst, you are responsible for the management of these Power BI assets, overseeing the sharing and distribution of items, such as reports and dashboards, and ensuring the security of Power BI assets. Apps can be a valuable distribution method for your content and allow easier management for large audiences. This feature also allows you to have custom navigation experiences and link to other assets within your organization to complement your reports.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics help answer questions about what will happen in the future. Predictive analytics techniques use historical data to identify trends and determine if they're likely to recur. Predictive analytical tools provide valuable insight into what might happen in the future. Techniques include a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques such as neural networks, decision trees, and regression.

Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics help answer questions about which actions should be taken to achieve a goal or target. By using insights from prescriptive analytics, organizations can make data-driven decisions. This technique allows businesses to make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty. Prescriptive analytics techniques rely on machine learning as one of the strategies to find patterns in large datasets. By analyzing past decisions and events, organizations can estimate the likelihood of different outcomes.

Analyze

The analyze task is the important step of understanding and interpreting the information that is displayed on the report. In your role as a data analyst, you should understand the analytical capabilities of Power BI and use those capabilities to find insights, identify patterns and trends, predict outcomes, and then communicate those insights in a way that everyone can understand.

Visualize

The visualization task is where you get to bring your data to life. The ultimate goal of the visualize task is to solve business problems. A well-designed report should tell a compelling story about that data, which will enable business decision makers to quickly gain needed insights. By using appropriate visualizations and interactions, you can provide an effective report that guides the reader through the content quickly and efficiently, therefore allowing the reader to follow a narrative into the data. The reports that are created during the visualization task help businesses and decision makers understand what that data means so that accurate and vital decisions can be made. Reports drive the overall actions, decisions, and behaviors of an organization that is trusting and relying on the information that is discovered in the data.

The basic building blocks in Power BI

Visualizations Datasets Reports Dashboards Tiles

Model

When the data is in a proper state, it's ready to be modeled. Data modeling is the process of determining how your tables are related to each other. This process is done by defining and creating relationships between the tables. From that point, you can enhance the model by defining metrics and adding custom calculations to enrich your data. Creating an effective and proper data model is a critical step in helping organizations understand and gain valuable insights into the data. An effective data model makes reports more accurate, allows the data to be explored faster and more efficient, decreases time for the report writing process, and simplifies future report maintenance.

Dashboards

When you're ready to share a report, or a collection of visualizations, you create a dashboard. Much like the dashboard in a car, a Power BI dashboard is a collection of visuals that you can share with others. Often, it's a selected group of visuals that provide quick insight into the data or story you're trying to present.

Business analyst

While some similarities exist between a data analyst and business analyst, the key differentiator between the two roles is what they do with data. A business analyst is closer to the business and is a specialist in interpreting the data that comes from the visualization. Often, the roles of data analyst and business analyst could be the responsibility of a single person.

The common flow of activity

1. Bring data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report. 2. Publish to the Power BI service, where you can create new visualizations or build dashboards. 3. Share dashboards with others, especially people who are on the go. 4. View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in Power BI Mobile apps.

3 Steps of Diagnostic Analytics

1. Identify anomalies in the data. These anomalies might be unexpected changes in a metric or a particular market. 2. Collect data that's related to these anomalies. 3. Use statistical techniques to discover relationships and trends that explain these anomalies.

Data analyst

A data analyst enables businesses to maximize the value of their data assets through visualization and reporting tools such as Microsoft Power BI. Data analysts are responsible for profiling, cleaning, and transforming data. Their responsibilities also include designing and building scalable and effective data models, and enabling and implementing the advanced analytics capabilities into reports for analysis. A data analyst works with the pertinent stakeholders to identify appropriate and necessary data and reporting requirements, and then they are tasked with turning raw data into relevant and meaningful insights.

Database Administrator

A database administrator implements and manages the operational aspects of cloud-native and hybrid data platform solutions that are built on Microsoft Azure data services and Microsoft SQL Server. A database administrator is responsible for the overall availability and consistent performance and optimizations of the database solutions. They work with stakeholders to identify and implement the policies, tools, and processes for data backup and recovery plans.

Dataset

A dataset is a collection of data that Power BI uses to create its visualizations. Datasets can also be a combination of many different sources, which you can filter and combine to provide a unique collection of data (a dataset) for use in Power BI.

Visualization

A visualization (sometimes also referred to as a visual) is a visual representation of data, like a chart, a color-coded map, or other interesting things you can create to represent your data visually.

Which data analyst task has a critical performance impact on reporting and data analysis? A. Model B. Analyze C. Visualize

A. Model -An optimized and tuned data model performs better and provides a better data analysis experience.

What can you do to improve performance when you're getting data in Power BI? A. Remove unnecessary columns and rows B. Export database files to CSV to load C. Combine date and time columns into a single column

A. Remove unnecessary columns and rows Always use the least amount of data needed for your project.

Name some Roles in data

Business analyst Data analyst Data engineer Data scientist Database administrator

A collection of ready-made visuals, pre-arranged in dashboards and reports is called what in Power BI? A. The canvas. B. Scheduled refresh. C. An app.

C. An app. -An app is a collection of ready-made visuals, pre-arranged in dashboards and reports. You can get apps that connect to many online services from the AppSource.

What is the common flow of activity in Power BI? A. Create a report in Power BI mobile, share it to the Power BI Desktop, view and interact in the Power BI service. B. Create a report in the Power BI service, share it to Power BI mobile, interact with it in Power BI Desktop. C. Bring data into Power BI Desktop and create a report, share it to the Power BI service, view and interact with reports and dashboards in the service and Power BI mobile. D. Bring data into Power BI mobile, create a report, then share it to Power BI Desktop.

C. Bring data into Power BI Desktop and create a report, share it to the Power BI service, view and interact with reports and dashboards in the service and Power BI mobile. -The Power BI service lets you view and interact with reports and dashboards, but doesn't let you shape data.

You're creating a Power BI report with data from an Azure Analysis Services MDX Cube. When the data refreshes in the cube, you would like to see it immediately in the Power BI report. How should you connect? A. Import B. T-SQL C. Live connection

C. Live connection This will reflect cube changes immediately.

What is a risk of having null values in a numeric column? A. That function SUM of data will be incorrect. B. That function MAX of data will be incorrect. C. That function AVERAGE of data will be incorrect.

C. That function AVERAGE of data will be incorrect. AVERAGE takes the total and divides by the number of non-null values. If NULL is synonymous with zero in the data, the average will be different from the accurate average.

Diagnostic Analytics

Diagnostic analytics help answer questions about why events happened. Diagnostic analytics techniques supplement basic descriptive analytics, and they use the findings from descriptive analytics to discover the cause of these events. Then, performance indicators are further investigated to discover why these events improved or became worse.

The flow of work in Power BI

A common flow of work in Power BI begins in Power BI Desktop, where a report is created. That report is then published to the Power BI service and finally shared, so that users of Power BI Mobile apps can consume the information.

If you have two queries that have different data but the same column headers, and you want to combine both tables into one query with all the combined rows, which operation should you perform? A. Append B. Merge C. Combine Column

A. Append Append will take two tables and combine it into one query. The combined query will have more rows while keeping the same number of columns.

Prepare

As a data analyst, you'll likely divide most of your time between the prepare and model tasks. Deficient or incorrect data can have a major impact that results in invalid reports, a loss of trust, and a negative effect on business decisions, which can lead to loss in revenue, a negative business impact, and more. Before a report can be created, data must be prepared. Data preparation is the process of profiling, cleaning, and transforming your data to get it ready to model and visualize.

Which of the following selections are not best practices for naming conventions in Power BI? A. Rename columns to have spaces in them. B. Abbreviate column names. C. Replace values that have integers with human readable results.

B. Abbreviate column names. Abbreviations lead to confusion because they are often overused or not universally agreed on.

Which one of the following options is the most important key benefit of data analysis? A. Decisive analytics B. Informed business decisions C. Complex reports D. Check your answers

B. Informed business decisions -A key benefit of data analysis is the ability to gain valuable insights from a business's data assets to make timely and optimal business decisions.

When connecting to a SQL Server database to get data, what language should you use to extract data? A. DAX B. T-SQL C. MDX

B. T-SQL T-SQL is the query language that you would use for SQL Server.

Which of the following are building blocks of Power BI? A. Tiles, dashboards, databases, mobile devices. B. Visualizations, datasets, reports, dashboards, tiles. C. Visual Studio, C#, and JSON files.

B. Visualizations, datasets, reports, dashboards, tiles. -Building blocks for Power BI are visualizations, datasets, reports, dashboards, tiles.

Which data role enables advanced analytics capabilities specifically through reports and visualizations? A. Data scientist B. Data engineer C. Data analyst

C. Data analyst -A data analyst uses appropriate visuals to help business decision makers gain deep and meaningful insights from data.

Cognitive Analytics

Cognitive analytics attempt to draw inferences from existing data and patterns, derive conclusions based on existing knowledge bases, and then add these findings back into the knowledge base for future inferences, a self-learning feedback loop. Cognitive analytics help you learn what might happen if circumstances change and determine how you might handle these situations.

Data Engineer

Data engineers provision and set up data platform technologies that are on-premises and in the cloud. They manage and secure the flow of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. The data platforms that they use can include relational databases, nonrelational databases, data streams, and file stores. Data engineers also ensure that data services securely and seamlessly integrate across data platforms.

Data Scientist

Data scientists perform advanced analytics to extract value from data. Their work can vary from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics. Descriptive analytics evaluate data through a process known as exploratory data analysis (EDA). Predictive analytics are used in machine learning to apply modeling techniques that can detect anomalies or patterns. These analytics are important parts of forecast models.

core components of analytics

Descriptive Diagnostic Predictive Prescriptive Cognitive

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics help answer questions about what has happened based on historical data. Descriptive analytics techniques summarize large datasets to describe outcomes to stakeholders.

Reports

In Power BI, a report is a collection of visualizations that appear together on one or more pages. Just like any other report you might create for a sales presentation or write for a school assignment, a report in Power BI is a collection of items that are related to each other.

Tiles

In Power BI, a tile is a single visualization on a dashboard. It's the rectangular box that holds an individual visual.

Tasks of a Data Analyst

Prepare Model Visualize Analyze Manage