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Intro to Power BI

What to know

Prerequisites

You should have a good working knowledge of pivot tables. This is a fast-paced intermediate level Data Academy course. Working knowledge of higher-level programming languages such as R or Python can be substituted for pivot tables. Exceptions are rare and at the approval of the instructor.

You must work with your IT department to ensure Power BI Desktop is installed prior to taking the course.

About this course

This course is designed to give you a strong foundation in Power BI and a jump-start on your 1st Power BI project.

Duration: Two 4-hour sessions, total 8 hours
Location: Offered virtually over Microsoft Teams

What to do

1. Review the course learning objectives

This course will cover the following topics:

  • Import and ‘data wrangle’ data from various sources
  • Join multiple data sets for analysis
  • Visualize/map the results
  • Automate the entire process
  • Share your work privately within the city or publicly
  • Best practices for documenting and managing your workflow
  • Tips and Tricks specially designed for the data needs of CCSF employees

Note that this class is dedicated to practice, not high-level overview or comparison to other programs. Review CCSF Power BI brown bag slide deck, which dives into those areas.

2. Join the interest list

Fill out our Course Interest form to get a notification email when courses open for enrollment.

This email will include a short Enrollment Form that you will need to fill out to get on the waitlist for that scheduled class. Seats are granted on a first-come, first-served basis so please complete the enrollment form as soon as you can.

Note that filling out the course interest form does NOT guarantee enrollment in any course.

Fill out the course interest form

More details

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a powerful, low-cost program that focuses on the entire business intelligence chain: from data wrangling to visualizing to sharing to automation.  Most BI programs (such as Tableau) focus primarily on data visualization, which often leaves users having to do significant (often repetitive) ‘data wrangling’ in Excel before it is ready to import. In contrast, Power BI enables users to clean data and then visualize and share.

Power BI also has substantial visualization/sharing/automation abilities allowing for easier exploration of your department’s data by your co-workers and the public. Instead of always having to calculate how many X are in Supervisorial District Y, you can now create an embed-able chart on your department website that automatically updates and always shows the most up-to-date estimates.

Resources