A Power BI Pro license and access to the Power BI service is necessary to follow many of the topics and examples in this book. The assignment of the Power BI Service Administrator role within the Office 365 admin center, as well as administrative access to an On-premises data gateway, would also be helpful for the second half of this book. It's assumed that readers are familiar with the main user interfaces of Power BI Desktop and have some background in business intelligence or information technology.   

The primary data source for the examples in this book was the AdventureWorks data warehouse sample database for SQL Server 2016 CTP3. A SQL Server 2017 Developer Edition database engine instance was used to host the sample database. For the import mode dataset, an Excel workbook stored the sales plan data. For the DirectQuery dataset, the sales plan data was stored in the sample SQL Server database.

The Power BI Desktop files and specific queries and scripts utilized in the book are included in the code bundle. However, the source data and database are not included in the code bundle. Additionally, the database used by the book contains objects not included in the downloadable sample database, such as SQL views for each fact and dimension table. Therefore, even with access to a SQL Server 2017 database engine instance and the sample AdventureWorks data warehouse database, the examples in the book cannot be completely reproduced.