Microsoft Power BI is popular for a reason. This self-service business intelligence cloud service not only is highly rated—it’s free. PCMag.com reviewer Pam Baker says Power BI “does a fantastic job of combining power analytics with a user-friendly user interface (UI) and remarkable data visualization capabilities,” and adds, “It’s one of the best BI tools on the market and is one of our three Editors’ Choice recipients.”
Industries, where Power BI training comes in handy, include retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and professional services. The service is a game-changer because it allows nontechnical people to easily create graphical reports of data, filter data, share it with others, and much more—no IT department required, meaning even small companies can use it successfully.
Whether you’ve already begun a career in business intelligence, data analysis, ETL (extract, transform, load) and data warehousing or another data-driven area, or you just want to add to your job skills and marketability in the business world, getting a Power BI certification is a smart move. And when you’re preparing for a job interview, make sure you consider these answers to Top Power BI interview questions. While this isn’t a full Power BI tutorial, it will help you get started understanding the basics.
All of these can be used in conjunction. For example, you might create a report on your desktop, and then publish and share it online so that colleagues on mobile devices can read it.
A content pack is a ready-made, predefined collection of visualizations and reports using your chosen service (for example, Salesforce). You’d use one when you want to get up and running quickly, instead of creating a report from scratch.
DAX stands for Data Analysis Expressions. It’s a collection of functions, operators, and constants used in formulas to calculate and return values. In other words, it helps you create new info from the data you already have.
You’d use a custom visual file if the prepackaged files don’t fit the needs of your business. Custom visual files are created by developers, and you can import them and use them in the same way as you would the pre-packaged files.
Excel, Power BI datasets, web, text, SQL server and analysis services.
Power BI Desktop groups the data in your visuals into chunks. You can, however, define your own groups and bins. For grouping, use Ctrl + click to select multiple elements in the visual. Right-click one of those elements and, from the menu that appears, choose Group. In the Groups window, you can create new groups or modify existing ones.
On a report page, you can resize a responsive slicer to different sizes and shapes, and the data contained in it will be rearranged to match. If a visual becomes too small to be useful, an icon representing the visual takes its place, saving space on the report page.
This is when steps defined in the Query Editor are translated into SQL and executed by the source database, instead of by your own device. It helps with scalability and efficient processing.
This is the programming language used in Power Query. It’s a functional, case-sensitive language that’s similar to other programming languages and easy to use.
Visual-level filters filter data within a single visualization. Page-level filters work on an entire page in a report, and different pages can have different filters. Report-level filters filter all the visualizations and pages in the report.
You can configure an automatic refreshing of data daily or weekly, and at different times. You can schedule only one refresh maximum daily unless you have Power BI Pro. In the Schedule Refresh section, simply use the pulldown menu choices to select a frequency, time zone and time of day.
Power Map can display visualizations that are geographical in nature. Therefore, some kind of location data is needed—for example, city, state, country or latitude and longitude.
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Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are both data analytics tools. Power BI has an extensive free version as well as a premium paid version, while Tableau’s free version has limited capabilities. Power BI is considered more intuitive to use than Tableau, as some features in Tableau are hidden behind menus, which makes it harder to learn and use. Power BI has a natural-language query tool, which Tableau doesn’t. Overall, however, Tableau may offer more capabilities for those who are experienced in data analytics. So for the question of Power BI vs. Tableau, Microsoft Power BI is generally considered better for those new to data analytics, especially if they already have experience in Microsoft products such as Excel, Azure and Office 365.
These are just some of the Microsoft Power BI interview questions you might encounter. To learn more answers and get a career-boosting Power BI certification, sign up for Simplilearn’s Power BI Certification Training today!
Shivam Arora is a Senior Product Manager at Simplilearn. Passionate about driving product growth, Shivam has managed key AI and IOT based products across different business functions. He has 6+ years of product experience with a Masters in Marketing and Business Analytics.
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