March 2026
Intermediate to advanced
478 pages
12h 7m
English
Content preview from Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate Study Guide
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Chapter 2. Preparing Data
This chapter covers the essentials of data preparation as it pertains to the exam. This will help you understand the features of Power Query in Power BI Desktop for the desktop data analyst. After you pass the exam, Chapter 7 picks up where the exam leaves off and will show you how to apply data preparation best practices and perform data transformations at enterprise scale.
Very few sources of data are ready for analysis without some preparation. In most cases, data must be cleansed and shaped. The stages of iterative business intelligence design include preparing, modeling, calculating, and visualizing data. It is important that you understand the dependencies between these stages, both in order and in reverse order. Why reverse order? A popular phrase says that if you really understand something, you “know it forward and backward.” This is especially true when working with data. I find that this approach helps me to create a mental map and to see the complete picture along with each constituent part.
Understanding the required end result along with each dependency enables you to envision and design a complete solution. For example: to visualize and present accurate results, calculations and measures must be created atop an appropriately crafted data model consisting of tables prepared using queries that ingest, load, and transform data. See? Reverse-order thinking is important and puts the entire process into perspective.
With the reverse order approach ...
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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.