Microsoft Power BI Training

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform that provides nontechnical business users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data. Power BI's user interface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with Excel and its deep integration with other Microsoft products makes it a very versatile self-service tool t. A free version of Power BI is intended for small to midsize business owners; a professional version called Power BI Plus is available for a monthly subscription fee.

The following courses are offered. All courses can be customized and delivered at your location.

  Need private Power BI Training for your organization? 

  • Course topics tailored to your group's specific Power BI needs
  • Courses can be customized with your specific data (additional fee applies)
  • Up to 25 attendees=lower cost/attendee
  • Contact Larry Porter for details

Power BI Training Schedule 2024


Continuing Education Credits

Certificate of Completion

A Certificate of Completion is provided with all courses showing number of contact hours (instruction), and field of study as "Information Technology" for continuing education purposes. Power BI courses are 12 contact hours and  equivalent to 1.2 CEU's, except the Introduction - Advanced Analyzing Data with Power BI which is 24 contact hours and 2.4 CEU's.

The term CEU is not a trademarked term; therefore, any educational institution may use it to describe their courses. Professions and industries usually regulate their approved continuing education within their bylaws and not one institute or accrediting body has become a standard to accept in this regard. Professionals should always consult their Association or regulating body prior to embarking on continuing education and not assume a CEU will be accepted as part of their professional development.

DATA VISUALIZATION CERTIFICATE OF COMPETENCY (3 Classes)

  • 4 online sessions
  • Time commitment 12-16 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • Optional class for “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fees: See registration page

These trainings can also be customized and delivered at your location.

  • Data Visualization Principles, Storyfinding, and Storytelling
  • Introduction to MS Power BI  
  • Advanced MS PowerBI

To achieve a Certificate of Competency, all classes must be taken through the Center for Business Analytics.  In the event that professional experience meets the prerequisite for a class, another approved class may be substituted (limited to 1 class per Certificate of Competency)


Introduction to MS Power BI

The course is designed to be an introduction to Microsoft PowerBI and its use as a data analytics and reporting tool. There will be an even mix of lecturing and working sessions where the students will be developing their own dashboards with some sample data. The material will focus on the core building blocks of PowerBI.

No prior experience required

                                     Introduction to MS Power BI Course Outline
Day One   Day Two  

·       Overview of PowerBI Service

·       Loading data into PowerBI

·       Creating simple visuals

·       Using PowerBI quick measures

·       Data viz design tips

·       Creating interactive reports with filters, cards, KPI’s and targets

 

By the end of day one, students will be able to load data into PowerBI and create a fully interactive report based on simple calculations.

·       Data modeling – table relationships, calculated fields, DAX measures

·       What-if scenarios

·       Forecasting tools

·       Using R within PowerBI

·       Sharing and deploying dashboards

·       Data security

·       Final PowerBI project

By the end of day two, students will be able to model large datasets within PowerBI, generate dynamic dashboards, and deploy those dashboards for use in their businesses.

 
  • 4 online sessions with live instructor
  • Time commitment 12-16 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • Optional class for “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fee: See registration page

This training can also be customized and delivered at your location.


Advanced MS Power BI:

This course takes a deep dive into advanced level Power BI skills, covering lesser known but more advanced skills from the Power BI set of features. This course is a continuation of the "Introduction to Power BI" class or the following knowledge is recommended prior to taking this course: how to connect to data, how to build basic data models, basic PowerBI visualizations, and basic DAX knowledge. Desired Outcomes: • Create more sophisticated calculations and metrics using advanced DAX functionality • Improve the end user experience with various interactive reporting tools • Efficiently publish and deploy PowerBI reports across an organization.

                                     Advanced MS Power BI Course Outline
Day One Day Two
 

Advanced Data Modeling with DAX

·       Running totals and moving averages

·       Filtered calculations and subtotals<

·       Calculated tables

·       DAX variables

·       Advanced time intelligence functions

Data Transformations in the Query Editor

·       Removing duplicates

·       Identifying errors

·       Merging queries

·       Conditional logic

·       Normalization

Spatial Analysis

·       ArcGIS maps

Integrating R with Power BI

Features for Interactive Reporting

·       Parameters and What-if Analysis

·       Action Buttons

·       Bookmarks

·       Drill-through

·       Power BI analyze distribution

·       Bookmarks

·       Report Themes

·       Power BI templates

Deployment and Security

·       Power BI free vs premium

·       Creating apps and workspaces

·       Reports vs dashboards

·       Data Gateways and Scheduled Refresh

·       Row-level Security

·       Dataflows (preview feature)

 
  • 4 online sessions
  • Time commitment 12-16 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • Optional class for “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fee: See registration page

This training can also be customized and delivered at your location.


Data Visualization Principles, Storyfinding, and Storytelling:March/April 2024 TBD

NOTE:  This class is tool agnostic and is a general survey of data visualization designed for anyone who wants to learn more how to create effective visualizations using any software

Data visualization—the study of the visual representation of data—plays a crucial role in the work of researchers and analysts. Organizations tasked with producing, releasing, and analyzing large amounts of data can more effectively analyze and communicate their work by understanding how to better visualize their data. Often, however, visualizing research results is considered secondary to the analysis, which ultimately limits the effective relay of information.

The Data Visualization Training is a two-day workshop that provides a well-rounded introduction to the field of data visualization to create better, more effective data visualizations. The workshop (detailed below) includes an overview of the field of data visualization, an overview of different visualization types, strategies and best practices to visualizing data, and how to use data visualization to tell stories and more effectively communicate information.

Workshop outlines can be found below and can be modified and tailored for specific needs.

Topics

  • Introduction to data visualization and why it’s important
  • Principles of visual perception
  • Understanding the preattentive attributes
  • Data visualization fundamentals and best practices
  • Thinking critically about visualization design
  • Compare and contrast real-world examples
  • Telling a story through visualization and effectively present results to an audience
  • How to use data visualization to analyze data
  • Creating visual insights from data that generate action
  • Design principles for creating effective data visualization
  • Creating dashboards to monitor organizational status and gain understanding of the data
  • Principles of dashboard design


Objectives

  • Understand the fundamentals of data visualization
  • Become familiar with types of data and visualization
  • Learn data visualization best practices
  • Broaden attendees’ graphic literacy
  • Increase clarity and impact of messages through data visualization
  • Examine clients visualizations for feedback and learning opportunity

No prior experience required

  • 4 online sessions
  • Time commitment 12-16 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • Required class for “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fees: See registration page

These trainings can also be customized and delivered at your location.


Introduction - Advanced: Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform that provides business users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data. Power BI's user interface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with Excel and its deep integration with other Microsoft products makes it a very versatile self-service tool. A free version of Power BI is intended for small to midsize business owners; a professional version called Power BI Plus is available for a monthly subscription fee.  This course combines Introduction and Advanced Power BI materials in an extended training that can prepare attendees to take  the "Data Analytics with Power BI Certification" exam that is required to  receive the MS Data Analyst Associate Certificate.   

This double session class combines Introduction and Advanced Power BI trainings.

No prior experience required

The MS exam is not required to receive a Certificate of Completion for this course. 

Attendees must make their own arrangements to take the MS certification exam if they want to receive the MS Data Analysts Associate Certification.

Download details of Microsoft Certified: Data Analyst Associate – Skills Measured

This class will be 8 sessions over four weeks

INTRODUCTION -  ADVANCED POWER BI COURSE OUTLINE

Major Topic

Skills Covered

Preparing the Data

Getting data from different sources

Profiling the data

Cleaning, transforming and loading data

Modeling the Data

Designing a data model

Developing a data model

Creating measures by using DAX

Optimizing model performance

Visualizing the Data

Creating reports

Creating dashboards

Enriching reports for usability

Analyzing the Data

Enhance reports to expose highlights

Perform advanced analysis

Deploy and Maintain Deliverables

Manage datasets

Create and manage workspaces

  • 8 online sessions
  • Time commitment 32-36 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • This class counts as both Introduction and Advanced Power BI towards the “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fees: See registration page

These trainings can also be customized and delivered at your location.


Applied Power BI

In this course, Spencer Baucke is going to provide you the tools that you need to be an effective Power BI developer. With course content ranging from Beginner to Advanced, Spencer will share tips and tricks that he's learned along the way working with clients at Tessellation as well as experiences to help you in your Power BI journey. 

While this course will include topic instruction and lectures, it will be heavily focused on gaining hands-on experience that you can take to your place of work. The goal of this course is to enable attendees to translate lessons learned during our time together and apply them immediately and add value to your teams.  This training doesn’t just teach theory, but uses real world examples to help attendees apply Power BI in their day to day work environment.

Prerequisite: Attendees should have prior experience using Power BI in a professional environment, or have taken the “Introduction to Power BI” training offered through the Center for Business Analytics

Applied Power BI Course Details
Day 1 & 2 Day 3 & 4

Day 1

Business Intelligence Overview
User Interface and Power BI Environment
How Companies use Power BI
Power BI Structure and Microsoft Stack
Power BI Service overview
Data Gateways, Data Flows
Importing data into Power Query
Case Study #1 - Import Power BI data set
Custom Queries , Query Folding
Transformations & Data Cleansing
Custom Columns
Case Study #2 - Importing and Cleaning Data
Useful Power Query functions
Data Modeling
Functions and Web scraping
Case Study #3 - Import Power BI

Day 2

Available Charts in Power BI
Advanced Charts in Power BI
What Charts to use and When
Case Study #1 - Creating Basic Charts
Basic Design Principles
Report Layout and Formatting
Report Interactions
Case Study #2 - Designing a Report
Other Report Canvas options - images/buttons
Drill Throughs
Filter Pane options
Case Study #3 - Building an Interactive, Multi-Page Report
Report Page Tool Tips
Themes
Templates
Case Study #4 -Tooltips & Templates

 

 

Day 3

Introduction to DAX
Measures v Columns
Creating Basic Measures
Case Study #1 - Creating Measures
CALCULATE()
SUMMARIZE()
RELATED, VALUES, other functions
Case Study #2 - Creating Complex Measures
Variables
Creating tables with DAX
ALL, ALLSELECTED filter applications
Case Study #3 - Building metrics
Dates Tables
Time Intelligence functions
DAX Resources
Case Study #4 - Building YTD metrics

Day 4

Conditional Formatting
Custom Sorting
SWITCH()ing Metrics
Case Study #1 - SWITCH and Sort Practice
Performance Analyzer
Report Optimization
What-If Analysis
Case Study #2 - What-If Analysis Practice
Row Level Security
Deployment Best Practices
Dashboards
Case Study #3 - Building a Dashboard
Power BI Forums
Data Stories Gallery
Capstone Project!
Questions, Feedback

  • 4 online sessions
  • Time commitment 12-16 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • Optional class for “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fee: See registration page

This training can also be customized and delivered at your location.


MS Power Platform Fundamentals: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate & Virtual Agents

The Microsoft Power Platform is a collection of low-code products that enable business users to easily access, analyze, and automate the data captured in the organization. The Power Platform is a collection of four products: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. Each individual product can tackle individual challenges within a business, but connecting these products together allow organizations to create seamless and robust end-to-end solutions that tackle an organization’s most difficult problems, all without the need for extensive IT knowledge. The Power Platform is built on the idea that all levels of the organizations should be able to build sophisticated, automated solutions that improve productivity and enable data-driven decision-making.

Power BI allows an organization to create reports and dashboards that aggregate, analyze, visualize, and share data, allowing for data-driven decisions across all levels of the business. Power BI’s user interface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with Excel, enabling business users to quickly generate and share automated reports that provide new insights into the business. Since its release in 2015, Power BI has become the most widely used business intelligence tool in the market.

Power Apps gives everyone in an organization the ability to quickly create applications in a low-code environment that can be deployed throughout the business. Advanced functionality, including pre-built AI components, can now be leveraged by non-developers. Power Apps can be used across all functions of a business to improve & standardize processes, capture data, create approval or service request applications, and enable improved cross-function collaboration within an organization.

Power Automate empowers everyone within an organization to streamline business processes using low-code, drag-and-drop tools with hundreds of prebuilt connectors to external data sources that automate repetitive tasks with ease. Examples of uses cases would be setting automatic reminders for past due tasks, moving data between systems, sending an email every time a file is updated, connecting to external data sources, and automating tasks like computing data in Excel.

 

MS Power Platform Course Details

Power BI (Day 1)

Preparing data

  • Extracting data from different sources
  • Cleaning, transforming, and loading the data

Modeling data

  • Designing an optimized data model
  • Create measures by using the Power BI formula language (DAX)

Visualizing Data

  • Create reports
  • Generating insights and analyzing data
  • Enriching reports for usability

Deployment

  • Sharing Reports
  • Monitoring Usage
  • Security

Power Apps (Day 2)

App Development

  • Model-Driven apps
  • Canvas apps
  • Connecting to external data
  • Learn controls and formulas

Testing

  • Performance checks of apps
  • Testing security and permissions

Deployment

  • Sharing apps
  • Updating existing applications

Power Automate (Day 3)

Flow Development

  • Automated Flows vs Scheduled Flows vs Instant FlowsCreating triggers, actions, conditions, and logic
  • Running flows with buttons, trigger tokens, user inputConnecting to external data sourcesDevelop automated approval process

Process Advisor

  • Analyze flow processes with recordings
  • Test security

Power Virtual Agents (Day 4)

Chatbot Development

  • Creating topics
  • Calling actions
  • Understanding message nodes, question nodes, conditions, and trigger phases
  • Leveraging pre-built entities

Deployment/Administration

  • Publishing chatbot
  • Monitoring chatbot usage
  • Monitoring chatbot performance

Power Platform Integration (Day 4)

Develop robust solutions integrating multiple components of the Power Platform

  • Leveraging Power App in Power BI
  • Automating Power BI refresh through Power Automate
  • Automating approval process through Power Apps and Power Automate
  • 8 online sessions
  • Time commitment 32-36 hours     
  • Certificate of Completion.
  • This class counts as both Introduction and Advanced Power BI towards the “Data Visualization” Certificate of Competency

Online Course Fees: See registration page

These trainings can also be customized and delivered at your location.



POWER BI INSTRUCTOR

Gabe Welp
Senior Technical Analyst, Amend Consulting: 

Gabe specializes in Business Intelligence projects, and has implemented and developed enterprise-wide reporting solutions for a diverse group of companies spanning multiple industries. The majority of Gabe's Business Intelligence projects have relied heavily on Power BI. Gabe received his BA in Economics from Brown University. Gabe worked at The Kroger Co. in their finance group before joining AMEND in 2018.


DATA VISUALIZATION INSTRUCTOR

Jeffrey Shaffer headshot

Jeffrey Shaffer
VP Information and Technology, Unifund
Adjunct Professor, University of Cincinnati
Tableau Zen Master

 Jeffrey Shaffer is an expert in applying data visualization to create insights and competitive advantage. Mr. Shaffer is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business where he teaches Data Visualization in the graduate course series for Data Analytics. He is a regular speaker at conferences, symposiums, universities and corporate training programs on the topic of data visualization, he writes for the data visualization blog at Data + Science and he was a finalist in the 2011 Tableau Interactive Visualization Competition. Mr. Shaffer also teaches data visualization at the KPMG Advisory University. Mr. Shaffer is Vice President of Information Technology and Analytics at Unifund. He joined Unifund in 1996 and has been instrumental in the creation and development of the complex systems, analytics and business intelligence platform at Unifund.


Testimonials

  • The essentials were covered.  The content was appropriate without being too slow.
  • Well versed and knew his stuff
  • Covered a lot of material in a short period of time.  Well done
  • Gabe is very knowledgeable and did a very good job presenting the material
  • Great class, relevant and very helping in enhancing my skills

For more information on these training courses or custom training, please contact
Headshot of Larry Porter

Larry Porter

Training , Marketing and Sponsorship Manager

513-556-4742