Bøker av Alison Box

Are you a reasonably competent Power BI user but still struggling to generate reports that truly tell the story of your data? Or do you simply want to extend your knowledge of Power BI by exploring more complex areas of visualizations, data modelling, DAX, and Power Query? If so, this book is for you. This book serves as a comprehensive resource for users to implement more challenging visuals, build better data models, use DAX with more confidence, and execute more complex queries so they can find and share important insights into their data. The contents of the chapters are in a question-and-answer format that explore everyday data analysis scenarios in Power BI. These questions have been generated from the author¿s own client base and from commonly sought-for information from the Power BI community. They cover a wide and diverse range of topics that many Power BI users often struggle to get to grips with or don¿t fully understand. Examples of suchquestions are:How can I generate dynamic titles for visuals?How can I control subtotals in a Matrix visual?Why do I need a date dimension?How can I show the previous N month¿s sales in a column chart?Why do I need a Star Schema?Why aren't my totals correct?How can I bin measures into numeric ranges?Can I import a Word document?Can I dynamically append data from different source files?Solutions to these questions and many more are presented in non-technical and easy-to-follow explanations negating the requirement to perform tiresome and fruitless ¿google¿ searches. There are also companion Power BI Desktop files that set out the answers to each question so you can follow along with the examples given in the book..After working through this book, you will have extended your knowledge of Power BI to an expert level, alleviating your existing frustrations and so enabling you to design Power BI reports where you are no longer limited by your lack of knowledge or experience.Who is This Book For: Power BI users who can build reports and now want to extend their knowledge of Power BI.

Take a concise approach to learning how DAX, the function language of Power BI and PowerPivot, works. This book focuses on explaining the core concepts of DAX so that ordinary folks can gain the skills required to tackle complex data analysis problems. But make no mistake, this is in no way an introductory book on DAX. A number of the topics you will learn, such as the concepts of context transition and table expansion, are considered advanced and challenging areas of DAX.While there are numerous resources on DAX, most are written with developers in mind, making learning DAX appear an overwhelming challenge, especially for those who are coming from an Excel background or with limited coding experience. The reality is, to hit the ground running with DAX, it's not necessary to wade through copious pages on rarified DAX functions and the technical aspects of the language. There are just a few mandatory concepts that must be fully understood before DAX can be mastered. Knowledge of everything else in DAX is built on top of these mandatory aspects. Author Alison Box has been teaching and working with DAX for over eight years, starting with DAX for PowerPivot, the Excel add-in, before moving into the Power BI platform. The guide you hold in your hands is an outcome of these years of experience explaining difficult concepts in a way that people can understand. Over the years she has refined her approach, distilling down the truth of DAX which is "e;you can take people through as many functions as you like, but it's to no avail if they don't truly understand how it all works."e; You will learn to use DAX to gain powerful insights into your data by generating complex and challenging business intelligence calculations including, but not limited to:Calculations to control the filtering of information to gain better insight into the data that matters to youCalculations across dates such as comparing data for the same period last year or the previous periodFinding rolling averages and rolling totalsComparing data against targets and KPIs or against average and maximum valuesUsing basket analysis, such as "e;of customers who bought product X who also bought product Y"e;Using "e;what if"e; analysis and scenariosFinding "e;like for like"e; salesDynamically showing TopN/BottomN percent of customers or products by salesFinding new and returning customers or sales regions in each month or each year Who This Book Is ForExcel users and non-technical users of varying levels of ability or anyone who wants to learn DAX for Power BI but lacks the confidence to do so

Create stunning and complex visualizations using the amazing Charticulator custom visuals in Power BI. Charticulator offers users immense power to generate visuals and graphics. To a beginner, there are myriad settings and options that can be combined in what feels like an unlimited number of combinations, giving it the unfair label, "e;the DAX of the charting world"e;. This is not true. This book is your start-to-finish guide to using Charticulator, a custom visualization software that Microsoft integrated into Power BI Desktop so that Power BI users can create incredibly powerful, customized charts and graphs. You will learn the concepts that underpin the software, journeying through every building block of chart design, enabling you to combine these parts to create spectacular visuals that represent the story of your data.Unlike other custom Power BI visuals, Charticulator runs in a separate application window within Power BI with its own interface and requires a different set of interactions and associated knowledge. This book covers the ins and outs of all of them.What You Will LearnGenerate inspirational and technically competent visuals with no programming or other specialist technical knowledgeCreate charts that are not restricted to conventional chart types such as bar, line, or pieLimit the use of diverse Power BI custom visuals to one Charticulator custom visualAlleviate frustrations with the limitations of default chart types in Power BI, such as being able to plot data on only one categorical axisUse a much richer set of options to compare different sets of dataRe-use your favorite or most often used chart designs with Charticulator templatesWho This Book Is ForThe average Power BI user. It assumes no prior knowledge on the part of the reader other than being able to open Power BI desktop, import data, and create a simple Power BI visual. User experiences may vary, from people attending a Power BI training course to those with varying skills and abilities, from SQL developers and advanced Excel users to people with limited data analysis experience and technical skills.