Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI

Power BI is a business intelligence tool provided by 1. Common Interview Question:

Microsoft 2. When will you prefer to use Power BI over other BI tools?
•It provides availability to plot advanced plots like a 3. How & what kind of data can be imported to Power BI?
waterfall chart 4. What is the difference between PowerQuery & M
•Supports importing data from Azure cloud seamlessly & language?
hence preferred by organisations using Azure ecosystem 5. In what methods can you schedule refresh for the Power BI
•Power BI provides a PowerQuery tool for basic data dashboard?
wrangling which works similarly to Excel 6. What are the three views of Power BI?
•Supports two languages for writing queries – DAX & M 7. What is DAX? Give some examples of its uses.
language 8. What is PowerQuery? Can we use it in Excel?
•Power BI has various versions like desktop, and server 9. What are calculated columns & calculated tables?
based on the user’s requirement 10. What are measures?
•Power BI is an alternative to other BI tools like Tableau, 11. What kind of filters are available in power bi?
Qlik, Looker 12. Many-to-many join isn’t preferred, why?
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI

Data flow for BI tools

In tools like Power BI, the data is loaded from various sources. Data is transformed & cleaned before loading to the data
warehouse. The visualization tool can directly connect with the data warehouse & hence can be used by users to create visuals
& reports easily
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Connectivity options in Power BI
Connectivity basically refers to data imports, Power BI offers live connection, direct query & import. If these are combined, then it
is referred to as a “composite.”

Here is a brief on all connectivity types.

 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Data Import
•Power BI has many modules to connect with various external data sources

•After selecting the data, we can click on the "Transform” button to make changes to the data.
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI

•Transform button will take you to the “power query” window where you can make data transformations.
•PowerQuery is like the backend of power BI report, whatever changes you make in power query, the output would be used by
power BI report to build a dashboard on
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI

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 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
•PowerQuery uses M language. You can check all transformations in M language by clicking on the “advanced editor” button in
the toolbar.

•“Close & Apply” button will implement the changes.

 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Power BI desktop includes three views:
•Report - Has all the visuals
•Data – contains the data loaded from the power query in tabular form
•Relationships - defines how tables are related
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Report View
The “Fields” tab on the right can be used to drag & drop columns in the view to build a dashboard.
The “visualisations” tab next to it is used to select & configure visuals
We can restrict various fields from the visualisation by using the “Filters” tab.
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Data View
Data view can be used to create new columns, and tables & do basic transformations like changing data type.
•Queries are written in DAX.

Image Tag: (1) Data View button (2) Columns (3) Formula bar – you can view or create new columns by directly entering formulae
in DAX query format (4) Search – This is used to search tables (5) Field list – Shows column headers within the table
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Relationship view
•Shows how tables are related.

•Relationships between tables can be created or changed using the “Manage Relationship” button in the toolbar
 Data Analysis and Visualisation in Power BI
Row-level security
•Row-level security means limiting access to data to people based on enrolment.
•Different roles are created & then users are assigned to them
•By clicking on “manager roles” under “modelling”, you can create roles.

In this example, users enrolled in the “Eastern US” role will only see data where the region is “East.”

Scheduled refresh
•To refresh publish power bi dashboard, the report needs to be refreshed after updating the dataset
•Scheduled refresh allows to automate the dataset & report refresh as per the given time say every Monday 5am
•Once the report is published online, go to the dataset location & right-click on it to schedule the refresh.

Improving PowerBI performance

•Too many row level measure will cause delay in load as value will be calculated for each cell
•Avoid many-many mapping
•Remove columns & table which aren’t used in visuals
•Avoid bi-directional filters
•Use “query analyser” to find the query which take the most time & improve them