Learning Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 3. Importing and Modeling Our Data

In the previous chapter, we went into detail to help you understand the UI functions of the Report and Data views. This chapter deals with the UI of Power Query and the Model view. By the end of this chapter, we’ll have imported the mockup class data into a Power BI Desktop file and used that data to demonstrate some of the basic capabilities of Power Query for data manipulation and shaping.

In our discussion of the Model view, we’ll demonstrate what relationships are in a data model and what they do. Finally, we’ll go through the data and actively try things with it. If you’re a hands-on learner, I highly recommend you take the sample data and follow along with me to try to replicate the steps and results.

Getting Our Data

For the purpose of this exercise, I’ll be working from three Microsoft Excel files that can be downloaded from https://oreil.ly/MS-power-BI-files. We’ll place ourselves in the shoes of a data visualization course instructor at Cool School University. We have files representing the information the school has given us, the information we’ve acquired ourselves from our pupils, and the students’ grades on their assignments.

Starting from the Home tab on the ribbon in the Report view, let’s use the Excel workbook shortcut and bring in our first file, called School Supplied Data. When we click the “Excel workbook” button, Power BI brings up an Explorer window to navigate to the Excel file. Select the ...