This book provides all you need to find data from external sources and
load and transform that data into Power BI where you can mine it for
business insights and a competitive edge. This ranges from connecting to
corporate databases such as Azure SQL and SQL Server to file-based data
sources, and cloud- and web-based data sources. The book also explains
the use of Direct Query and Live Connect to establish instant
connections to databases and data warehouses and avoid loading data.
The book provides detailed guidance on techniques for transforming
inbound data into normalized data sets that are easy to query and
analyze. This covers data cleansing, data modification, and
standardization as well as merging source data into robust data
structures that can feed into your data model. You will learn how to
pivot and transpose data and extrapolate missing values as well as
harness external programs such as R and Python into a Power Query data
flow. You also will see how to handle errors in source data and extend
basic data ingestion to create robust and parameterized data load and
transformation processes.
Everything in this book is aimed at helping you deliver compelling and
interactive insight with remarkable ease using Power BI's built-in data
load and transformation tools.
What You Will Learn
- Connect Power BI to a range of external data sources
- Prepare data from external sources for easy analysis in Power BI
- Cleanse data from duplicates, outliers, and other bad values
- Make live connections from which to refresh data quickly and easily
- Apply advanced techniques to interpolate missing data
Who This Book Is For
All Power BI users from beginners to super users. Any user of the
world's leading dashboarding tool can leverage the techniques explained
in this book to turbo-charge their data preparation skills and learn how
a wide range of external data sources can be harnessed and loaded into
Power BI to drive their analytics. No previous knowledge of working with
data, databases, or external data sources is required*--*merely the need
to find, transform, and load data into Power BI..
