This book provides all you need to find data from external sources and load and transform that data into Power BI where you can mine it for business insights and a competitive edge. This ranges from connecting to corporate databases such as Azure SQL and SQL Server to file-based data sources, and cloud- and web-based data sources. The book also explains the use of Direct Query and Live Connect to establish instant connections to databases and data warehouses and avoid loading data. 

The book provides detailed guidance on techniques for transforming inbound data into normalized data sets that are easy to query and analyze. This covers data cleansing, data modification, and standardization as well as merging source data into robust data structures that can feed into your data model. You will learn how to pivot and transpose data and extrapolate missing values as well as harness external programs such as R and Python into a Power Query data flow. You also will see how to handle errors in source data and extend basic data ingestion to create robust and parameterized data load and transformation processes. 

Everything in this book is aimed at helping you deliver compelling and interactive insight with remarkable ease using Power BI’s built-in data load and transformation tools.

What You Will Learn

• Connect Power BI to a range of external data sources
• Prepare data from external sources for easy analysis in Power BI 
• Cleanse data from duplicates, outliers, and other bad values
• Make live connections from which to refresh data quickly and easily
• Apply advanced techniques to interpolate missing data

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Discovering and Loading Data with Power Bl Desktop

Chapter 2: Discovering and Loading File-Based Data with Power Bl Desktop

Chapter 3: Loading Data from Databases and Data Warehouses

Chapter 4: DirectQuery and Connect Live

Chapter 5: Loading Data from the Web and the Cloud

Chapter 6: Loading Data from Other Data Sources

Chapter 7: Power Query

Chapter 8: Structuring Data

Chapter 9: Shaping Data

Chapter 10: Data Cleansing

Chapter 11: Data Transformation

Chapter 12: Complex Data Structures

Chapter 13: Organizing, Managing, and Parameterizing Queries

Chapter 14: The M Language

Appendix A: Sample Data

Who This Book Is For

All Power BI users from beginners to super users. Any user of the world’s leading dashboarding tool can leverage the techniques explained in this book to turbo-charge their data preparation skills and learn how a wide range of external data sources can be harnessed and loaded into Power BI to drive their analytics. No previous knowledge of working with data, databases, or external data sources is required—merely the need to find, transform, and load data into Power BI.