Mastering Microsoft Power BI

I’ve agreed with Packt Publishing to author a new Power BI book – Mastering Microsoft Power BI. This project will begin after the Power BI World Tour event in New York and conclude in late February.

Here’s a link to both books on Packt.
The Cookbook is available on Amazon and should be available soon.

Differences with Power BI Cookbook

Books

Per the prior post, the Power BI Cookbook is heavily focused on the creation of Power BI content, particularly datasets, and included over 90 step-by-step technical examples (recipes). The three layers of datasets – connect & retrieve (M), data modeling, and analysis (DAX), and the visualizations built on top of datasets is of course essential to Power BI so this will also be included in the new book but with a greater emphasis on the technical concepts and recommended practices that can be applied to Power BI solutions generally.

Additionally, the new project will go much further into management and administration topics such as a planning Power BI projects, managing and administering Power BI, scaling up a Power BI solution with SSAS and/or Power BI Premium, DirectQuery models, and will go deep into the On-Premises Data Gateway and the Power BI Report Server. Just like the Cookbook, the content will be action-oriented with supporting technical examples and will include the latest features relevant to the given chapters and topics.

Planned Specs:

Chapters: 13
Pages: 429
Due Date: 2/23/2018

Mission:

Empower BI and business analytics professionals to create and manage robust, end-to-end Power BI solutions.

Audience:

This book is intended for BI professionals, business analysts who create Power BI content for others, and IT managers responsible for the deployment and administration of Power BI. It’s assumed that the reader has experience authoring and distributing Power BI content though programming experience with Power BI or related tools is not required. It’s also assumed that all developers and analysts have access to a Power BI Pro license and that managers have been assigned to the Power BI Service Administrator role.

Content creators will be interested in design techniques, best practices, and customization examples. BI and IT managers will be interested in Power BI project lifecycles, visibility to Power BI user and resource activity, and managing both the Power BI Service and the On-Premises Data Gateway. The book also covers areas interesting to those who consume or access Power BI content and approve Power BI projects and deployments.

Defining a Power BI ‘Master’

Power BI is a vast and rapidly evolving ecosystem and thus, for deployments of any significant scale or complexity, some level of specialization is recommended. For example I’ll be speaking exclusively about the ‘Dataset Designer’ role at the Power BI World Tour but of course Report Authors, Power BI Admins, and relationships with other stakeholders (data source SMEs/owners) are all necessary.

In my view the Power BI ‘Master’ is someone who can go deep into core topics such as authoring DAX measures but can also contribute to other areas ranging from data retrieval to visualization to distribution and administration. The ability to understand the integration points and the breadth of knowledge required to switch roles is often more valuable than an expert level understanding of one particular area. Additionally, Power BI masters look beyond short term functional requirements and ‘quick fixes’ – they value manageability and maintenance costs/complexity, code readability, version control, documentation, and more.

Insight Quest Impact

Given the new book project, and to a lesser extent organizing work with the Boston BI User Group, unfortunately there likely won’t be new blog posts or needed updates to past blogs.