Everyone’s challenges are unique. Here is list of resources that have helped me so far in my work. No doubt I’ll keep adding to this list the more I learn.
YouTube
- Guy in a Cube – YouTube – Short videos that help. The videos on setting up incremental refreshes have especially been useful to me.
- SQLBI – YouTube – If it’s help with DAX that you need, then this is the one. The videos on optimising datasets are also a great place to start.
- How to Power BI – YouTube – I found one of the key reasons users like pie charts so much in Power BI is that they provide both the actual and % values compared to a bar graph. This video helped me to provide a solution to show both on a bar graph too, overcoming that barrier to using bar graphs in reports – 100% Control of Data Labels in Power BI – YouTube
Blogs
- Elegant BI – I use the best practice analyser developed by Michael Kovalsky to check my reports before hitting the publish button. Here is link outlining it and how to install: Best practice rules to improve your model’s performance | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI
- SQLDBI – There is a lot of content as per their YouTube channel. I’ve also found the courses really useful and in-depth – not that surprising as they wrote the book on DAX ;). I’m sharing a link to this article though, as I found learning this has been really useful in making better data models – Filter slicers without using bidirectional filters in Power BI – SQLBI
Data Visualisation
Storytelling with Data – The book Storytelling with data is really good, and I wish I’d read it sooner. Makes you realise a graph is never just a graph and so much more goes into making good visualisations. My only caveat is it is focused on explanatory rather than exploratory visualisations. Explanatory visualisations are graphs that you analyse and present versus dashboards (what I mainly build in Power BI) that are self-guided. But the fundamental lessons on making good graphs still apply!
Stephen Few – Leading expert on data visualisation. The latest book is Now you see it. I had a challenge with line graphs where the totals where so different that using actuals on a line graph wouldn’t work. This book had a solution for that, converting to %’s of total first before comparing the different products.
Star Schemas
I enjoyed reading this book and really helped to explain star schemas which is important for data modelling in Power BI (as per this article).