Learning Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 6. Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together: From Raw Data to Report

In the first five chapters of this book, we laid a foundation for the use of Power BI. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to go from raw data in Excel to a Power BI report.

To facilitate that, we’ll bring in the Cool School University data that we’ve already worked with so far and add data from a second class’s grades using Power Query to wrangle our data into the desired form. Then we’ll build out the relationships we need so that we can get the data to fit together. After that, we’ll build some measures to help us get deeper insights.

Finally, we’ll build our first report page with some easy, out-of-the-box visuals that will help us learn a little more about our students’ performance. This first, simple report should allow our users to gain valuable insights about our classes that they didn’t have before, and that will help us tell a story that will inform our future decision making.

Your First Data Import

Let’s begin by importing the data you need. First locate the six Excel files within the ZIP file associated with this text. We’ll initially focus on three files, ignoring the other three whose names have “Chapter6Addition” at the end. Don’t worry, we’ll get to them in the next section.

Before we start, if you want to take time to familiarize yourself with all of the data, feel free to open the files and look around. I recommend saving copies of the files so that you can try different things with the data ...