Intended Audience: Stakeholders responsible for implementing Power BI; assumes no knowledge of the Power BI ecosystem
Understand the full Power BI ecosystem
- The Desktop
- The Power Query Editor
- The Service
- Workspaces
- Apps
Prep your data well
- The best is to have clean data at the source
- Followed by being able to clean data at the source
- Use the Power Query Editor
- In the Desktop
- In the Service
- There are estimates that 80% of the work in a business intelligence project is in the data
- prep. Be sure to plan enough time to fully prep the data.
- Fully understand what the Power Query Editor can do for you.
Master the data model
- Know your schemas–Power BI likes the star schema
- Relationships are key to your visuals performance (or even working at all)
- When you have a problem with your visual 99 times out of 100 it will be because of a data model problem–always look first at your data model
Don’t be afraid of DAX
- You don’t have to be an expert in DAX but you want to be comfortable with some basic DAX principles.
Leverage the power of the Service
- Do not use the conventional file dissemination methodology.
- You can store PBIX files on SharePoint sites, and One Drive sites, and you can email them to others but these ‘freebie’ methodologies will not work for a long term solution.
- Do not omit licensing as part of your planning. Your organization will need at least Pro licenses unless you choose to go a Premium route.
- Power BI is converging with Teams and to leverage the synchronicity you will need to make sure you have licensed users appropriately
Workspaces and apps are workflow and communication tools
- Here are some principles to consider as you organize your workspaces
- Security
- Topic
- Department
- Audience
Become a data culture
- Organize your data sources
- Where are they stored?
- Are they named clearly?
- Are there duplicates?
- Curate your data sources
- Know the data’s provenance
- Review its’ accuracy
- Keep it clean
- Keep it up to date
- Align data sources with each other
- Train your staff
- Appoint data stewards and data wranglers (even if only in an informal capacity)