Original subtitles

Instructor: So at this point, you may be asking yourself,

well, what exactly is Power BI?

Well, according to Microsoft, Power BI is a self-service

business intelligence platform

which includes both desktop and web-based applications

for connecting, modeling, and visualizing data.

If you want the whole sales pitch

you can head to powerbi.microsoft.com.

But what I wanna show you here

is something called the Gartner Magic Quadrant

for analytics and business intelligence platforms.

If you're not familiar with Gartner,

they're a market intelligence company

that produces these competitive analyses

in these magic quadrants

for all sorts of different industries and fields

every single year.

This one's updated as of January, 2023.

And what we're basically looking at

is a competitive landscape showing completeness of vision

on the X-axis and ability to execute on the Y.

And this basically creates four different quadrants.

You've got niche players here in the lower left

who may be just starting out.

You've got challengers in the top left

who have a high ability to execute

but maybe a less complete vision.

You've got visionaries in the lower right.

And then finally, where you wanna be is the leader quadrant

the magic quadrant in the top right.

And this is exactly where we see Microsoft

largely due to the work that they're doing in Power BI.

And to see them pulling away from the pack here

is very impressive,

especially seeing some of these heavy hitters like Tableau,

Qlik, Google, AWS, Domo, and more.

So, needless to say, this is a very, very exciting time

to be learning Power BI.

Now let's take a minute and talk about

why Power BI is so powerful.

First up, it lets you connect, transform, and load

huge, huge volumes of data, and you can access that data

from virtually anywhere from databases, flat files,

web sources, cloud services, folders, et cetera,

and you can create fully automated ETL workflows

to extract, transform, and load that data

for further analysis.

Next, you can build relational models

directly inside of Power BI

to blend data from multiple sources.

This is an incredibly powerful skillset

for anyone working in an analytics or data science role

because you can create table relationships

that allow you to analyze holistic performance

across an entire relational data model.

And that's exactly what we're gonna practice building

in this course.

You can also define complex calculations

using the DAX formula language,

those data analysis expressions.

We're gonna use DAX to enhance our data sets

and enable some really interesting

advanced analytics capabilities.

And like we talked about,

Power BI lets you bring your data to life

and build interactive reports and dashboards.

With Power BI Desktop

you can truly build professional quality

enterprise-grade reports and dashboards.

Last but not least, when you learn Power BI

you're developing a versatile in-demand skillset.

Like we just talked about, Power BI is the industry leader

in self-service BI, and the skills that you develop

in this course, data prep, data modeling, data analysis,

and data visualization will be extremely transferrable

and valuable throughout your career.

Now, last but not least, I wanna take just a minute

and draw some comparisons between Excel and Power BI.

So what we're gonna do here is look at this Venn diagram

where we have some Excel specific features on the left,

things like spreadsheets, pivot tables, cell formulas,

things that are uniquely Excel

and then we have some Power BI features here on the right

things that are uniquely Power BI like the report View,

custom visuals, interactive dashboards,

and Power BI service.

But where I wanna really focus on is the intersection.

This is where you'll find some of the most powerful tools

that are actually common to both platforms.

Power Query, the Data Model, and DAX

because what many people don't realize

is that Excel and Power BI are built

on top of the same exact analytics engines.

The difference is that Power BI

takes those same data transformation

and modeling capabilities and it adds powerful visualization

and publishing tools on top of them.

So what that means is that when you're learning Power Query

and Power Pivot DAX in Excel, you're also learning Power BI

at the same time and vice versa.

And the beauty is that this makes the learning curve

for Power BI very smooth for existing Excel users

and it makes the transition very easy.

In fact, later in the course, we're gonna talk about

how you can import an entire data model

that you've built in Excel directly into Power BI Desktop.

So there's your quick introduction to Power BI Desktop.

Let's talk about how to actually download

and install the program so that we can get up and running.