Dashboard in a Day

In this module, you'll learn everything you need to get started with Microsoft's Dashboard in a Day. You'll download all the necessary files, set up your workspace, and gain a clear understanding of the tools required to complete the course. All of which can be found below.

In this module, Emily will guide you through the foundational steps of Microsoft’s "Dashboard in a Day" course, providing a comprehensive introduction to Power BI and its transformative capabilities. You’ll begin by downloading Power BI Desktop, navigating the platform’s interface, and setting up essential course files. Emily will walk you through the process of connecting and visualizing data, using a real-world scenario with Van Ardstil, an electronics company, to illustrate how Power BI helps businesses benchmark against competitors and analyze trends. Along the way, you’ll explore key concepts such as the Digital Feedback Loop and the integration of Power BI with other Microsoft services, setting the stage for creating actionable insights and making informed business decisions. By the end of this module, you’ll be fully prepared to dive deeper into building and sharing your own reports, with additional resources and live training options available to enhance your learning.

In this module, Emily will guide you through the essential steps of preparing and modeling data in Power BI Desktop, focusing on data cleansing, transformation, and combining sources for insightful reporting. You’ll begin by exploring Power Query Editor, where Emily will demonstrate how to clean and shape your data by renaming tables, filling null values, and splitting columns. She’ll also show you how to append queries to consolidate data from multiple sources into a single table, ensuring your data is accurate and ready for analysis. Additionally, Emily will introduce DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) for creating custom calculations, emphasizing the importance of transforming data for meaningful and relevant reports. By the end of this module, you’ll have a solid foundation in data preparation, empowering you to create precise, insightful Power BI reports.

In this module, Emily will guide you through the essential steps of data modeling and exploration in Power BI, building on your knowledge to create insightful and interactive reports. You’ll start by exploring the AI capabilities of Power BI, such as the Q&A visual and Quick Insights, to analyze data from Van Artstool and its competitors. Emily will then demonstrate how to establish relationships between tables, focusing on the importance of unique identifiers and the significance of one-to-many relationships in data analysis. As you progress, you’ll learn how to group data for effective filtering, use drill downs and slicers to explore revenue data, and create visual interactions for more targeted analysis. Finally, Emily will guide you through creating a date table using DAX functions and managing relationships between tables, ensuring your reports are both comprehensive and efficient. By the end of this module, you’ll have a strong foundation in data modeling, enabling you to build powerful, actionable insights with Power BI.

In this module, Emily will guide you through the essential techniques for enhancing data analysis and visualization in Power BI, focusing on hierarchies, matrix visuals, and calculated measures. You’ll begin by learning how to create hierarchies within your data model, adding layers such as geography and products to enable detailed drill-down analysis. Emily will demonstrate this with a real-world example, using Australia's 2021 revenue spike to illustrate how hierarchies improve insights. You’ll then explore matrix visuals, a powerful tool for comparing data categories like urban and rural revenue, and learn how to incorporate revenue percentages for a deeper financial overview. Finally, Emily will introduce calculated measures, highlighting their efficiency and performance benefits over calculated columns. You'll learn to use DAX functions like CALCULATE and DIVIDE to compare sales revenue and calculate year-over-year growth, making your data models more dynamic and responsive. By the end of this module, you’ll be well-equipped to organize and analyze complex data with precision and clarity.

In this module, Emily guides students through advanced data visualization techniques in Power BI, focusing on conditional formatting, custom report themes, and the integration of logos into slicers for enhanced report aesthetics. She emphasizes the importance of manipulating visual elements to convey data insights more effectively, using tools like background color formatting and the customization of slicer options to improve user interaction with reports. Key terminology includes "conditional formatting," "custom report themes," and "slicer customization," which are crucial for students to master in order to create compelling and informative data reports.

In this module, Emily guides students through the process of enhancing Power BI reports by importing custom visuals from App Source and utilizing bookmarks for dynamic report navigation. She demonstrates how to personalize reports with background images, logos, and the smart narrative feature to provide insights, alongside the integration of a custom visual, Play Axis, to animate data over time. Emily emphasizes the importance of bookmarks in storytelling within reports, showing how to create and navigate them to highlight specific data insights effectively

In this module, Emily will guide you through the essential steps of creating mobile-friendly reports, publishing your work, and building dashboards in Power BI. You’ll start by learning how to design a mobile report view using the mobile layout feature in Power BI Desktop, ensuring your visuals are accessible and clear on smaller screens. Next, Emily will walk you through the process of publishing your report to the Power BI Service, where you’ll create a collaborative workspace for sharing and managing your reports and semantic models. Finally, you’ll discover how to build and customize dashboards in Power BI Service by pinning key visuals from your reports, allowing you to monitor important metrics and drill down into specific data points. By the end of this module, you’ll have the skills to make your reports both mobile-ready and collaborative, while effectively visualizing and analyzing data through dashboards.

In this module, Emily will guide you through the advanced features of Power BI, focusing on interactive data querying, managing permissions, and mobile accessibility. You’ll begin by exploring Power BI's Q&A feature, where you can query data directly from a dashboard to generate visuals such as bar charts and tree maps, helping you gain quick insights and set alerts for specific metrics. Next, Emily will demonstrate how to manage permissions within Power BI workspaces, showing you how to assign roles, share content, and create apps for distributing reports and dashboards. Finally, you’ll learn how to access and interact with Power BI reports on mobile devices, ensuring you can view and analyze data on the go. By the end of this module, you’ll be equipped to make data-driven decisions, collaborate effectively, and maintain mobile accessibility in Power BI.

In the concluding session of the Dashboard in a Day course, Emily provides a comprehensive recap of the entire learning journey. She highlights the progression from importing and cleansing data, through to creating and sharing interactive dashboards and reports in Power BI. This wrap-up serves as a consolidation of the skills developed throughout the course, emphasizing the transition from beginner to proficient user in utilizing Power BI for data analysis and visualization.