Business Intelligence has become one of the buzzwords that defines an age. Its younger sibling, self-service BI, has attained the status of a holy grail for businesses. Managers want their staff to deliver insight in seconds, and users just want to do their jobs quickly and to produce clear, telling, and accurate analyses with tools that are intuitive and easy to use.

Microsoft recognized these trends and needs a short time ago when it produced the first version of Power BI Desktop. Moreover, Microsoft made this amazing toolkit absolutely free.

Since its launch, the product has grown beyond recognition. It now allows any user to take data from virtually any source and use it to produce stunning dashboards and compelling reports that will seize their audience’s attention. Using this rapidly evolving tool, any user can slice and dice the data with remarkable ease and then add metrics, instant analyses, and KPIs to project the insights that create a real competitive advantage.

This book shows how to deliver eye-catching Business Intelligence with Microsoft Power BI Desktop. It teaches you how to make raw data into clear, accurate, and interactive information. The aim of this book is to help you to push your BI delivery to the next level. In these chapters you will learn to create great-looking visualizations and let your audience have fun by interacting with the elegant and visually arresting output that you can now deliver. You will see how to choose from a wide range of built-in and third-party visualization types so that your message is always enhanced. You’ll discover ways to deliver those results on the PC, on tablets, and on smartphones, as well as share results via the cloud. Finally, this book helps you save time by preparing the underlying data correctly without needing an IT department to prepare it for you. Power BI Desktop will let your analyses speak for themselves. This book will help you learn how to unleash its vast resources.

If you wish, you can read this book from start to finish, as it is designed to be a progressive tutorial that will help you to learn Power BI Desktop. However, as Power BI Desktop is composed of several interdependent BI functions, this book is broken down into groups of chapters that focus on the various areas of the product.

This book comes with a small set of sample data that is used to create the examples that are presented throughout the book. I realize that it may seem paradoxical to use a tiny data set for a product that can handle tens of millions of rows of data, but I prefer to use a comprehensible set of source data so that the reader can concentrate on what is being learned, rather than the data itself.

It is inevitable that not every question can be anticipated and answered in one book. Nonetheless, I hope that I have answered many of the self-service BI questions that you might encounter and-more importantly-have given you the approaches and the confidence to resolve most of the Power BI Desktop challenges that you might encounter when applying this product to solve real-world problems.

I wish you good luck in using Power BI Desktop and I sincerely hope that you have as much fun with it as I did in writing this book.