Learning Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 7. Advanced Reporting Topics in Power BI

To this point, we have successfully loaded, transformed, and modeled data. We’ve built out an example report page using many individual pieces of Power BI Desktop that we discussed in the preceding chapters. In this chapter, we’re going to review some of those pesky advanced topics that I said we’d address later.

The tools and topics we’ll discuss here can be valuable and bring that little extra to your report that takes it from good to great or unlocks that one insight that makes the whole report click. However, using many of these functions without a firm understanding of the basics can also lead to misunderstanding exactly what you’re doing or what you’re looking at.

Specifically, we’ll cover the currently available AI-powered visuals along with what-if analysis. I’ll also discuss integration of R and Python into your Power BI setup and go over some of its limitations. These are incredibly powerful and have the ability to help you uncover facts about your data that would be otherwise buried and difficult to find. They’ll also enable you to put forth scenarios to help your organization make better decisions.

AI-Powered Visuals

At the time of writing, Microsoft has put four AI-powered visuals into Power BI Desktop, and it’s expected it will continue to invest in creating more AI-powered visuals to further extend Power BI’s capabilities. All these visuals work in both Desktop and the service. You can find ...