Power Bi - guideline books

[chellamotte]

Hi all,

I am kind of new to Power BI. I have quite some experience with power pivot, and currently trying to master power query.

(you should know my background is a master's in law, management and applied economics).

My job is helping SME's in their growth etc.... by making budgets, valuations and whatnot.

I also like to learn a lot by myself.

Now I was wondering if there are some really good starter books to help me learn and understand power BI to create dashboards which will blow our customers off their socks without emptying their pockets (just as an extra, people don't want to see numbers, they want visual information).

I have checked out most videos for guided learning on the power bi website, and am now using "power query for power bi and excel". But more and more clients are using different software with different data sources (SAP, dynamics, salesforce).

I know there is so much information on the internet, but using books whilst using the software gives me much less distractions. ALso, my company reimburses me for every excel, microsoft, etc... course, book and whatnot.

A great example, we had a client with a gigantic store in all sorts of electronics. And we went step by step, in order to create a management information dashboard. 

I did all the legwork, had a complete setup in Excel which combined their daily sales from the past 4 years, combined with number of sales people in every department, the weather on that particular day and a lot of influential variables.

Then we went to a developer to create a dynamic dashboard coupled to the excel and their ERP system (for the daily sales). And the prices were outrageous.

Now I took a bit of my free time to try and create something useful for them. Excluding the learning and studying, it took me about 5 hours to create a very nice dynamic dashboard. I asked my boss if I could just show it to our client, and see if this would meet his demands. He was blown away.

Imagine we would bill 100 euros an hour. And for a complicated dashboard I spend 15 hours, that comes down to 1500 euros, for a completely interactive dashboard.

The partners we asked to make it quoted us anywhere between 15 & 25K euros.

I hope you get my plan, we want this to be a standard service towards our clients.

tl;dr

What are some great books to learn to use the full force of power bi (from excel, sap, dynamics etc...). And please no online courses because they distract me way to much!

Thanks in advance

[tringuyenminh92 · Accepted solution]

Hi @chellamotte,

For books, I would like to recommend some books of Alberto & Marco Russo or Mat Allington:

• Basic to understand DAX
• Advanced with some helpful patterns
• Training & Books of http://exceleratorbi.com.au

For pratice, you could try to watch some videos of PBI in youtube like:

• Good tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/user/mspowerbi/videos
• Some useful tips: https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/category/books/ 

Always check documents of PBI: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-get-started/

to be aware of limitation

To up to date with new features: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ and Guy in cube's clips

As your description, you have multiple clients with serveral kind of source, so please prepare good architect to adapt with complicated ETL or consolidation solution even though PBI has been equipped M language and PBI editor as ETL layer. but so far there are some unstable in connectors for SAP or ODATA of dynamic or saleforces.

[chellamotte]

Thank you very much for the information!

In the first stage (jsut the first few months) it will be trial and error, and just making financial dashboards based on our excel budgets and worksheets.

But I have an offer on the table from my cousin who owns a SAP consultancy company (I'm not a big fan of SAP to be honest, but that's just personal) to start making different sorts of dashboards. I showed him the trial ones I made from basic Excel sheets and he was impressed.

Since I'm starting doing my own job independently in a few months (just exactly the same job at the same company, but not as an employee, since I now have an official recognition from the government to be a financial service provider, and this has to be self-employed) I thought it would be a nice extra revenue stream for me to work with him for the dashboards.

Not planning on getting rich or ripping people off, just planning on buying a house in the future 🙂

Great community! Thanks a lot