Microsoft Power BI Training

First, what Power BI actually is

Power BI is two things people often confuse. Power BI Desktop is a free Windows application where you connect to data, build a model, and design a report. The Power BI Service is the cloud side, where you publish that report, share it, and schedule the data to refresh. Nearly everyone ends up using both, and our classes cover both.

The part that catches people out is that Power BI is less a charting tool than a data modeling tool with charts attached. Most of the difficulty in a real report is in the shaping and the model, not the visuals, which is why the courses spend most of their time there.

If you have never opened it

Start with the analyst course. It is the standard path, it assumes no Power BI experience, and it covers the whole job: connecting to data, shaping it, building a model, writing measures, and publishing something colleagues can use. It also prepares you for the Microsoft certification, if that matters to you or your employer.

You should be comfortable in Excel and know roughly what a table and a relationship are. Beyond that, no.

If you are coming from Excel

Most people who end up in Power BI got there through a spreadsheet that stopped coping, and they arrive already knowing how to build a report. That is a different starting point from never having opened the thing, and it is worth using rather than sitting through.

What an Excel user actually needs is the translation. What a PivotTable becomes here, why the model matters when the spreadsheet never made you think about one, and which of the habits that served you well in Excel will now work against you. Getting that straight first makes everything after it faster.

Take the analyst course above instead if you want the whole job end to end, including the certification. Take this one if what you want is a dashboard your team can use, and soon.

If your formulas have stopped making sense

This is the most common reason people come back for a second class. You can build a report, but your measures give totals that look wrong at one level and right at another, and the explanations you find online contradict each other.

That is filter context, and it is the thing self taught DAX almost always gets stuck on. A dedicated DAX class is worth more at this point than another general course.

If you are rolling it out for an organization

Different problem. Governance, workspaces, capacity, row level security and refresh schedules matter more than any single report, and the mistakes are expensive to unpick later. Talk to us about a private class built around how your data is actually organized, rather than a public one built around a sample dataset.

Tell us what you are rolling out →

If you are not sure yet

Take the analyst course. It is the right answer for most people, and the specialized classes make far more sense once you have hit the problems they solve. Nobody has ever regretted understanding the model before learning the shortcuts.

Or look at every Power BI class and date and see what is running.

If most of your reporting still happens in a spreadsheet and you are not certain Power BI is the answer yet, which Excel course should I take covers the other side of that decision. PivotTables and Power Query solve a great many problems that people bring to Power BI, and they solve them in a tool everybody already has.

The short version

• Never used itthe Power BI Data Analyst course
• Already build reports in Excelthe dashboards class, then the analyst course if you want the certification
• Building reports, stuck on measuresthe DAX course
• Responsible for the platformtalk to us about private training
• Not surethe analyst course, then decide

Training a team

Above a handful of people, private delivery is usually cheaper than individual seats, and it is better training: the class runs on your dates, uses your data, and the discussion is about your systems rather than a fictional company. We deliver online or at your offices, six people for on site and four for virtual.

ISInc also implements Power BI, not just teaches it. Model design, report building, migration from Excel or Tableau, performance work on reports that have got slow, and enterprise rollout. Training a team and then leaving them to it is how most Power BI projects stall, so plenty of clients pair the two.

How our classes are delivered covers what a seat includes and how organizations buy them.

Frequently asked questions