Power BI, From Zero

Take a spreadsheet from your desktop to a live, scheduled, trustworthy Power BI report - Power Query, the data model, DAX, real visualizations, and publishing done right.

1. What Power BI Actually Is & Getting Set Up What Power BI actually does under the hood (it's a database with a report on top, not a fancier Excel chart), and how to install Power BI Desktop and get oriented before touching a single visual.
2. Connecting to Data Sources How does Power BI actually get your data in, and why does the connection mode you pick (Import vs DirectQuery vs Live Connection) quietly decide how the rest of the report behaves?
3. Shaping Data with Power Query How to turn messy, real-world spreadsheets and exports into clean tables Power BI can model - Power Query's Applied Steps, the core transforms (unpivot, split, merge, append), and why query folding matters.
4. The Data Model & Relationships Why Power BI wants several small, related tables instead of one wide spreadsheet, and how relationships and cardinality make that model behave correctly when you build a report.
5. DAX From Intuition DAX looks like Excel formulas but evaluates in a completely different way - this phase builds the mental model of row context and filter context so DAX formulas stop feeling like magic incantations.
6. Measures vs Calculated Columns Why does the same DAX formula behave differently depending on where you type it, and how do you know whether a calculation belongs in a measure or a calculated column?
7. Time Intelligence How do I build a 'sales vs last year' or 'year-to-date' number without hand-writing date math - and why does it break if I don't have a real date table?
8. Visualizations That Do Not Lie Power BI will build any chart you drag onto the canvas, including ones that quietly mislead - this phase covers which visual actually fits the question you're asking, and which of Power BI's own defaults (truncated axes, dual-axis scales, 3D, packed pie slices) distort the answer without you asking for that.
9. Building Reports & Dashboards What's the actual difference between a Power BI report and a dashboard, and how do you turn a data model into a canvas people actually click around in - filters, slicers, bookmarks, drillthrough, tooltips, and pinned tiles?
10. Publishing & Sharing (Workspaces, Apps, RLS) How a report on your laptop becomes something a whole team can open on the web, and how to make sure each person only sees the rows they're allowed to see.
11. Refresh, Gateways & Capacity Basics How a published Power BI report actually gets new data - scheduled refresh, why an on-premises gateway exists at all, and what capacity limits (rows, refreshes per day, dataset size) you'll bump into as a report grows up.