Greetings, friends! I am delighted to announce that I will be providing a full day pre-con on Power BI as part of SQL Saturday #453 in Minnesota in October. Woohoo! As you might guess, I am really excited about Power BI. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. It’s the old branding, but that’s fine for now. Hey, Microsoft, if you want to send me one with the new branding, I wear an XL. Thanks.
You have a PowerBI.com account, right? Right? Get a FREE one here.
I love the way Microsoft has been enabling users with the self-service offerings over the past few years. With Power BI, they have not just created a new offering, they have established an ecosystem for growing the Data Culture in pretty much any organization. Below is the abstract for this pre-con that just barely scratches the surface of what is possible with this fantastic technology. With their plan to release updates to the PowerBI.com service on a weekly basis and Power BI Desktop on monthly basis, it will be even better come October. 🙂
Click, Click WOW: The Exciting World of Power BI
With Power BI, Microsoft makes working with data even easier… AGAIN. After years of enabling IT and Power Users, they have released a new set of capabilities that truly enables EVERYONE. The NEW Power BI includes a cloud service, PowerBI.com, as well as a FREE, standalone application that combines Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View into a single environment completely independent of Excel called Power BI Desktop.
This Pre-Con will cover the entire Power BI user experience, from creating dashboards in the Service to using Power BI Desktop to create data models that help you get the answers you need.
Power BI Service
· What is Power BI?
o General offering overview
· Datasets
o Importing data from a number of sources, both on-premises and in the cloud
o Scheduling data refresh
· Reports
o Visualization overview
o Pinning Reports to a Dashboard
· Dashboards
o Putting it all together in Tiles
o Using natural language search to create new Tiles
o Sharing your Dashboard with others
· Configuration
o Setting up the Power BI Personal Gateway to access on-premises data
o Managing Groups for sharing and collaboration
Power BI Desktop
· Getting/Transforming Data (Power Query)
o Importing data from a number of sources, both on-premises and in the cloud
o Renaming, combining, splitting columns
o Changing formatting like Capitalization and removing unwanted spaces
o Creating new columns
o Replacing invalid values
o Brief introduction to the M language
· Designing Your Data Model (Power Pivot)
o Creating relationships between tables
o Using DAX to bring your model to life
o Modeling and DAX Best Practices
· Visualizing Data (Power View)
o Choosing from the vast array of visualizations
o Configuring visualizations for color, formatting, etc
o High-level data visualization best practices
Microsoft’s goal with Power BI has been, “Five minutes to WOW!” Imagine how many WOWs we can get in a full day pre-con!
Categories: Power BI, Pre-Cons, Presentations, SQLSaturday
Mark Vaillancourt 
Hello! I’d like to learn more about this training opportunity. I’ve attended a few SQL Saturday conferences, but I’ve never attended a pre-con before. Can you describe the format? For example, will it primarily be an all-day demo, or can I expect to go through exercises on my own computer? Are machines provided? Are there any prerequisites and/or should I set up a Power BI account before attending?
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Hi, EJ. Thanks for reaching out about this. This will be presented as a class (power point + lots of demo). It will last from 9AM to 5PM (there will be an hour for lunch and a few breaks in there as well). I would encourage you to sign up for Power BI and bring your machine (none are provided) if you want to follow along (some sources will be publicly available and you can use them easily). I will not be able to run this like a hands-on workshop, though. Being alone, I will not be able to provide support for you during the day as I will need to focus on teaching. I hope this helps and I hope to see you on October 9!
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