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Power BI Modern Features Course

Duration

This is a one day course split into several scheduled topics. Attendees can join one, several or all topics depending on their interest.

Knowledge Pre-requisites

This course assumes attendees have completed the Power BI Foundation course.

Learning Outcomes

Attendees will learn about important new features in Power BI in exercises that also refresh their familiarity with Power BI. This course is suitable for people who either: a) want to learn about the significant improvements to Power BI over the last year or so, or b) want a refresher since they have not used Power BI Desktop much recently.

Agenda

09:30 to 10:30: Improvements to visuals

There have been many improvements to Power BI visuals over the last year or so. These include:

• a new card visual
• a new button slicer
• some different style of bars: e.g. outline rather than solid. For example use solid for actuals and outline for forecast
• better data labels: add trend as well as value
• line charts: leader lines, smoothed and stepped lines
• sparklines

In this session, there is quick demo of some of these improvements and a guided tutorial on the new card visual.

11:00 to 12:00: Introduction To Visual calculations

Visual calculations provide an easier way to write typical visual calculations than DAX measures.
This is an introduction where we write some calculation using the templates provided, with no need to write any DAX. In an exercise, we will write visual calculations for

• running totals
• change on previous
• % of parent / total

12:30 to 13:30: More About Visual calculations

This is a more in-depth look at visual calculations. In an exercise, we will write visual calculations for

• change on previous value,
• time intelligence calculation such as year-to-date

14:00 to 15:00: DAX query view

When we have to write DAX measures, the new DAX query view provides a much more productive environment than the old “formula bar” approach. This section covers:

• an introduction to the DAX query view and how it changes the “flow” of how we build measures,
• the EVALUATE statement that starts all our DAX queries,
• the SUMMARIZECOLUMNS() function, the starting point for mots queries,
• how to DEFINE a measure and add it to the model,
• the best approach to building measures using the DAX query view,
• the template queries, e.g. define all measure in the model and
• lots of exercises in building firstly simple then more complex DAX measures

15:30 to 16:30: Using Copilot to help with DAX

We can use an Copilot, like Copilot, together with the DAX query view to help us write our DAX queries and measures. This can be a great help and a good learning exercise. In an exercise, we will prompt Copilot to write several DAX measures, test these in the DAX query view.

Note that Power BI tenants with a certain type of capacity license, can use Copilot as a code assistant directly from within the query view. We will include this in the course if this becomes available at SEGRO. However the approach of using an external Copilot means that we need to copy / paste the DAX generated by the tool into the DAX query view but this is a small inconvenience.