Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016 - Softcover

Collie, Rob; Singh, Avichal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1615470395 ISBN 13: 9781615470396

Publisher: Holy Macro! Books, 2016

Synopsis

Microsoft Power BI, including Power Pivot and Power Query, are a set of free add-ons to Excel that allow users to produce new kinds of reports and analyses that were simply impossible before.

This book, printed in full-gorgeous color, gives you an overview of Power BI, Power Pivot and Power Query, and then dives into DAX formulas, the core capability of Power Pivot. Always from the perspective of the Excel audience.

Written by the world's foremost Power BI bloggers and practitioners, the book's concepts and approach are introduced in a simple, step-by-step manner tailored to the learning style of Excel users everywhere. The techniques presented allow users to produce, in hours or even minutes, results that formerly would have taken entire teams weeks or months to produce. 

This book includes lessons on:-

• difference between calculated columns and measures
• how formulas can be reused across reports of completely different shapes
• how to merge disjointed sets of data into unified reports
• how to make certain columns in a pivot behave as if the pivot were filtered while other columns do not
• how to create time-intelligent calculations in pivot tables such as "Year over Year" and "Moving Averages" whether they use a standard, fiscal, or a complete custom calendar.
• how to leverage Power Query to make your Power Pivot models awesome!
• how to use Power BI Desktop and PowerBI.com and how they fit into the Excel landscape

The "pattern-like" techniques and best practices contained in this book have been developed and refined over several years of onsite training with Excel users around the world, and the key lessons from those seminars costing thousands of dollars per day are now available to you, within the pages of this easy-to-follow guide. This updated second edition covers new features introduced with Office 2016 and Power BI Desktop.

About this title

About the Author

Rob Collie is an entrepreneur, author, and consultant. He was one of the founding engineers behind Power Pivot at Microsoft and operates the world's leading Power Pivot/Power BI website, PowerPivotPro.com. He lives in Indianapolis. Avichal Singh (Avi) is Principal Consultant at PowerPivotPro where he blogs, trains and consults on PowerPivot and Power BI. His past experience includes building large scale Power BI solutions at Microsoft. He lives in Seattle.

From the Back Cover

Power Pivot for Excel and its close cousin Power BI Desktop are Microsoft's tightly-related pair of revolutionary analytical tools - tools that are fundamentally changing the way organizations work with data. We have repeatedly witnessed the "Power tools" transformative impact on the bottom line - far more robust and elegant than Excel alone, and much more agile and affordable than traditional BI tools. Their shared state of the art calculation engines (DAX and M) turn any PC into an analytical supercomputer, but the real secret is people - these tools are 100% learnable by today's users of Excel. The data revolution lays not in the hands of an elite few, but in YOUR hands, and we want to help you seize that opportunity.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Power Pivot and Power BI: the Excel User's Guide to the Data Revolution

By Rob Collie, Avi Singh

Holy Macro! Books

Copyright © 2016 Robert Collie and Tickling Keys, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61547-039-6

Contents

Dedications, 
Supporting Workbooks and Data Sets, 
Errata and Book Support, 
A Note on Hyperlinks, 
Foreword and Forward, 
Introduction - Our Two Goals for this Book, 
1 - A Revolution Built On YOU, 
2 - Power Pivot and the Power BI Family: Making Sense of the Various Versions, 
3 - Learning Power Pivot "The Excel Way", 
4 - Loading Data Into Power Pivot, 
5 - Intro to Calculated Columns, 
6 - Introduction to DAX Measures, 
7 - The "Golden Rules" of DAX Measures, 
8 - CALCULATE() – Your New Favorite Function, 
9 - ALL() – The "Remove a Filter" Function, 
10 - Thinking in Multiple Tables, 
11 - "Intermission" – Taking Stock of Your New Powers, 
12 - Disconnected Tables, 
13 - Introducing the FILTER() Function, and Disconnected Tables Continued, 
14 - Introduction to Time Intelligence, 
15 - IF(), SWITCH(), BLANK(), and Other Conditional Fun, 
16 - SUMX() and Other X ("Iterator") Functions, 
17 - Multiple Data Tables, 
18 - Multiple Data Tables – Differing Granularity, 
19 - Performance: Keep Things Running Fast, 
20 - Power Query to the Rescue, 
21 - Power BI Desktop, 
22 - "Complicated" Relationships, 
23 - Row and Filter Context Demystified, 
24 - CALCULATE and FILTER – More Nuances, 
25 - Time Intelligence with Custom Calendars: Greatest Formula in the World, 
26 - Advanced Calculated Columns, 
27 - New DAX Functions ... and Variables!, 
28 - "YouTube for Data" – The Importance of a Server, 
PS: Can We Ask You for a Special Favor?, 
A1 - Power Pivot and SSAS Tabular: Two Tools for the Price of One (again!), 
A2 - Cube Formulas – the End of GetPivotData(), 
A3 - Some Common Error Messages, 
A4 - People: The Most Powerful Feature of Power Pivot, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A Revolution Built On YOU

Does This Sound Familiar?

(Updated Fall 2015, but we decided to leave this part in Rob's first-person "voice" – because the authenticity is better-preserved).

In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton's character refers to the people he meets on airplanes as "single serving friends" – people he befriends for three hours and never sees again. I have a unique perspective on this phenomenon, thanks to a real-world example that is relevant to this book.

A woman takes her seat for a cross-country business flight and is pleased to see that her seatmate appears to be a reasonably normal fellow. They strike up a friendly conversation, and when he asks her what she does for a living, she gives the usual reply: "I'm a marketing analyst."

That answer satisfies 99% of her single-serving friends, at which the conversation typically turns to something else. However, this guy is the exception, and asks the dreaded follow-up question: "Oh, neat! What does that mean?"

She sighs, ever so slightly, because the honest answer to that question always bores people to death. Worse than that actually: it often makes the single-serving friend recoil a bit, and express a sentiment bordering on pity.

But she's a factual sort of person, so she gives a factual answer: "well, basically I work with Excel all day, making PivotTables." She fully expects this to be a setback in the conversation, a point on which we share no common ground.<

Edition details

• Publisher: Holy Macro! Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1615470395
• ISBN 13: 9781615470396
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 308