Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel (Business Skills)

This is a great book for those who want to understand data modeling. I bought this book hoping for a primer on Power BI, but quickly realized that that was not the book's intent -- the authors make this clear in the introduction. While I was mildly disappointed that it was not Power BI 101 or even DAX 101, I was glad that I learned what data modeling really is -- it is not SQL for Excel or Excel on steroids.As a newbie, I quickly learned that it was very easy to drag a column into a table and get a set of numbers that made no sense at all. One of the most valuable parts of this book is the recognition that nonsense data does happen, why it happens (e.g. weak relationships and bi-directional filtering) and how to build your model and relationships in a way to prevent nonsense data from creeping into your work. These lessons alone make this book worthwhile!

In my earlier preliminary review of this book, I was not able to locate any link in the book to download the Contoso database used for the chapter demos. But after delving deeper into the book, I discovered that it was not necessary to download and install the database.By sparing the reader the trouble of downloading and installing the database, the authors have already done the work of including the database in Power Pivot for each chapter's demos, allowing the reader to jump right in and begin exploring the demos and learning the skill to master Power BI and Power Pivot.The book is a welcome addition to my library of Power Pivot and Power BI books. So it deserves 5 stars.

In general it is awesome book. The only thing I wish it had is that instead of saying after presenting Dax code "better do in M" to actually make it a reference to M similar to DAX book. Yes, the book will be much larger, but it will be much more valuable in this case.

I just received this book and I was totally amazed by the condition that it was in. I am very very excited to dive deep in this book.Thank you

I found this book to be an excellent introduction to data modeling using DAX. It doesn’t focus on writing DAX equations, but rather how to setup the relationships between your tables to maximize the performance of your data model when using DAX formulas.

This book is a must have for anyone transitioning from Excel to Power BI and is taught in a manner that is helpful. I have many other books and this book does set the set standard for Excel users moving to Power BI. Excel will get frustrated with Power BI unless they have a good foundation of Power BI and how to develop models, relationships, calculated columns and measures.

I've just started reading the book. Looks great. It's not a big book at just over 200 pages but in some ways that's good. It's focused on concepts of building data models which is a critical skill for finance analysts. Is focused on practical examples and illustrations. I've bought all of the previous books by these authors and found them all to be great.

This book did not meet my particular needs, though I think it is fine for a different audience. Although the book's title contains the words "Power BI" and "Power Pivot", it is really a primer on how to structure a relational database. I am a business professional who is highly conversant with both Excel and Access. I am not, however, the person who is responsible for laying out all the data tables. I sometimes need to take data from multiple sources and perform analysis which I want to visualize. I bought the book hoping to get insight into how to take my existing analyses and create awesome Power BI visualizations with only modest modification of the underlying data structures. This book did not meet that need. I'm headed back to youtube for that kind of tutorial.