POWER BI Questions Part 3

Power BI Intermediate Questions

1. What is a dashboard?

The dashboard is like a single-page canvas on which you have various elements to create and visualize reports created by analyzing data. It comprises only the most important data from the reports to create a story.

The visual elements present on the dashboard are called Tiles. You can pin these tiles from the reports to the dashboard. Clicking any element on the dashboard takes you to the report of a particular data set.

2. What are the building blocks of Power BI?

The major building blocks of Power BI are:

• Datasets: Dataset is a collection of data gathered from various sources like SQL Server, Azure, Text, Oracle, XML, JSON, and many more. With the GetData feature in Power BI, we can easily fetch data from any data source.
• Visualizations: Visualization is the visual aesthetic representation of data in the form of maps, charts, or tables.
• Reports: Reports are a structured representation of datasets that consists of multiple pages. Reports help to extract important information and insights from datasets to take major business decisions.
• Dashboards: A dashboard is a single-page representation of reports made of various datasets. Each element is termed a tile. 
  Tiles: Tiles are single-block containing visualizations of a report. Tiles help to differentiate each report.

3. What are content packs in Power BI?

Content packs are packages comprising different Power BI objects such as reports, dashboards, datasets, etc. The two types of content packs are:

Service provider content packs: Service providers such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, etc. provide pre-built content packages

User-created content packs: Users can create their content packages and share them within the organization.

4. What are the various Power BI versions?

The three major versions of Power BI are as follows:

• Power BI Desktop: The free interactive tool that connects multiple data sources, transforms data, and creates visualized reports.
• Power BI Premium: The premium version is used for larger organizations with a dedicated storage capacity for each user. With premium, data sets up to 50GB storage capacity can be hosted along with 100TB storage on the cloud as a whole. It costs $4995 per month.
• Power BI Pro:  With the pro version, you get full access to the Power BI dashboard, creation of reports, along with unlimited sharing and viewing of reports. You also have a storage limit of 10GB per user.

5. What is DAX?

Data Analysis Expression (DAX) is a library of formulas used for calculations and data analysis. This library comprises functions, constants, and operators to perform calculations and give results. DAX lets you use the data sets to their full potential and provide insightful reports.

DAX is a functional language containing conditional statements, nested functions, value references, and much more. The formulas are either numeric (integers, decimals, etc.) or non-numeric (string, binary). A DAX formula always starts with an equal sign.

6. What are the purpose and benefits of using the DAX function?

DAX is much more than Power BI. If you learn DAX as a functional language, you become better as a data professional. DAX is based on different nested filters which magnificently improves the performance of data merging, modeling, and filtering tables.

7. What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot enables you to import millions of rows from heterogeneous sources of data into a single excel sheet. It lets us create relationships between the various tables, create columns, calculate using formulas, and create PivotCharts and PivotTables.

At a time there can be only one active relationship between the tables which is represented by a continuous line.

8. What is Power Query?

Power query is a function that filters transforms, and combines the data extracted from various sources. It helps to import data from databases, files, etc and append data

9. Difference between Power BI and Tableau?

The major differences between Power BI and Tableau are:

• While Power BI uses DAX for calculating columns of a table, Tableau uses MDX (Multidimensional Expressions).
• Tableau is more efficient as it can handle a large chunk of data while Power BI can handle only a limited amount. 
• Tableau is more challenging to use than Power BI.

10. What is GetData in Power BI?

GetData offers data connectivity to various data sources. Connect data files on your local system. The supported data sources are:

• File: Excel, Text/CSV, XML, PDF, JSON, Folder, SharePoint.
• Database: SQL Server database, Access database, Oracle database, SAP HANA database, IBM, MySQL, Teradata, Impala, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, etc.
• Power BI: Power BI datasets, Power BI dataflows.
• Azure: Azure SQL, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Data Lake, Azure Cosmos DB, etc.
• Online Services: Salesforce, Azure DevOps, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Dynamics 365, Facebook, GitHub, etc.
• Others: Python script, R script, Web, Spark, Hadoop File (HDFS), ODBC, OLE DB, Active Directory, etc.

11. What are filters in Power BI?

Filters sort data based on the condition applied to it. Filters enable us to select particular fields and extract information in a page/visualization/report level. For example, filters can provide sales reports from the year 2019 for the Indian region.  Power BI can make changes based on the filters and create graphs or visuals accordingly. Types of filters are:

• Page-level filters: These are applied on a particular page from various pages available within a report.
• Visualization-level filters: These are applied to both data and calculation conditions for particular visualizations.
• Report-level filters: These are applied to the entire report.