October 2023
Beginner to intermediate
288 pages
8h 28m
English
Content preview from Beginning Power BI for Business Users
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5Preparing Data
In Chapter 4, “Building Your First Report,” you built a report using a prebuilt dataset. That helped us ramp up your Power BI skills quickly! However, as I mentioned in that chapter, the first step in our proven method is to prepare your data. In this chapter, we're going to dive into a tool built into Power BI Desktop that will help you prepare your data for your data model. Power Query is the go-to tool for you if the data you are bringing into your data model is not ready for analysis.
What do I mean by “not ready?” Oftentimes the data available to you either is organized in a way that isn't conducive to analysis or is messy. By messy, it may have all kinds of inconsistencies, especially if the data has been manually entered. There's an old phrase you might be familiar with: “garbage in, garbage out.” That is what the preparing of data is all about. It's about making sure that what you're sending into your data model is clean, consistent, and clearly understood. By doing that you'll have a much better chance of turning your data into real insights.
In this chapter, we'll look at two different sources of real data that need some help before they can be useful to us in Power BI. (Frankly, they'd need some help even if you were going to use them in a tool like Excel.)
GDP DATA
The first source of data we'll look at is gross domestic product (GDP) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce. This data is updated on a monthly ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.