Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Part III. Working with Microsoft Power BI

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be Part 3 of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

If Part II was about getting comfortable with Microsoft Fabric as an end-to-end analytics platform, Part III zooms in on the place where many users actually experience the result of all that work: Power BI.

Power BI is often introduced as a reporting tool, but that description has become too small for what it really does. Yes, it creates reports and dashboards. Yes, it helps business users explore data visually. But underneath the visuals sits something much more important: the semantic model. That model is where raw tables become business concepts, where reusable measures define official calculations, and where performance, trust, governance, and user experience either come together beautifully or start quietly falling apart. That is why this part of the book focuses less on making pretty charts and more on building the analytical layer that makes those charts reliable.

We begin in Chapter 10 with the core Power BI components. You’ll see how Power BI Desktop ...