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Back in 2011, the rise of Business Intelligence tools posed a challenge to Microsoft to build its own business intelligence tool. Microsoft introduced the Power BI to deliver compelling analytical capabilities to existing Microsoft Excel and upgrade it to be intelligent enough to generate interactive reports.

According to Gartner's Magic Quadrant, Microsoft Power BI is one of todays top business intelligence tools, chiefly because most IT firms rely on Power BI for their business analytics. As a result, the current IT industry finds a massive demand for Power BI Experts.

This tutorial is solely dedicated to helping aspiring Power BI professionals grasp the essential fundamentals of Power BI and crack the interviews in real-time. The tutorial is organized based on three categories, outlined below.

We have five dozen questions for you, so lets begin by going through some refresher-level or frequently asked beginner-level Power BI interview questions.

Power BI is a business analytics tool developed by Microsoft that helps you turn multiple unrelated data sources into valuable and interactive insights. These data may be in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or cloud-based/on-premises hybrid data warehouses. You can easily connect to all your data sources and share the insights with anyone.

Because Power BI provides an easy way for anyone, including non-technical people, to connect, change, and visualize their raw business data from many different sources and turn it into valuable data that makes it easy to make smart business decisions.

Both Tableau and Power BI are the current IT industry's data analytics and visualization giants. Yet, there are a few significant differences between them. You will now explore the important differences between Tableau and Power BI.

Tableau uses MDX for measures and dimensions

Power BI uses DAX for calculating measures

Tableau is capable of handling large volumes of data

Power BI is qualified only to handle a limited amount of data

Tableau is best suitable for experts

Power BI is suitable for both experts and beginners

Tableau User Interface is complicated

Power BI User Interface is comparatively simpler

Tableau is capable of supporting the cloud with ease.

Power BI finds it difficult, as its capacity to handle large volumes of data is limited.

The differences between Power Query and Power Pivot are explained as follows:

Power Query is all about analyzing data.

Power Pivot is all about getting and Transforming data.

Power Query is an ETL service tool.

Power Pivot is an in-memory data modeling component

Power BI Desktop is an open-source application designed and developed by Microsoft. Power BI Desktop will allow users to connect to, transform, and visualize your data with ease. Power BI Desktop lets users build visuals and collections of visuals that can be shared as reports with your colleagues or your clients in your organization.

Power Pivot is an add-on provided by Microsoft for Excel since 2010. Power Pivot was designed to extend the analytical capabilities and services of Microsoft Excel.

Power Query is a business intelligence tool designed by Microsoft for Excel. Power Query allows you to import data from various data sources and will enable you to clean, transform and reshape your data as per the requirements. Power Query allows you to write your query once and then run it with a simple refresh.

Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) is divided into the Excel BI Toolkit and Power BI.

SSBI is an abbreviation for Self-Service Business Intelligence and is a breakthrough in business intelligence. SSBI has enabled many business professionals with no technical or coding background to use Power BI and generate reports and draw predictions successfully. Even non-technical users can create these dashboards to help their business make more informed decisions.

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 data you already have.

The term "Filter" is self-explanatory. Filters are mathematical and logical conditions applied to data to filter out essential information in rows and columns. The following are the variety of filters available in Power BI:

Custom Visuals are like any other visualizations, generated using Power BI. The only difference is that it developes the custom visuals using a custom SDK. The languages like JQuery and JavaScript are used to create custom visuals in Power BI.

Get Data is a simple icon on Power BI used to import data from the source.

Some of the advantages of using Power BI:

Here are some limitations to using Power BI:

Power Pivot for Excel supports only single directional relationships (one to many), calculated columns, and one import mode. Power BI Desktop supports bi-directional cross-filtering connections, security, calculated tables, and multiple import options.

There are three main connectivity modes used in Power BI.

An SQL Server Import is the default and most common connectivity type used in Power BI. It allows you to use the full capabilities of the Power BI Desktop.

The Direct Query connection type is only available when you connect to specific data sources. In this connectivity type, Power BI will only store the metadata of the underlying data and not the actual data.

With this connectivity type, it does not store data in the Power BI model. All interaction with a report using a Live Connection will directly query the existing Analysis Services model. There are only 3 data sources that support the live connection method - SQL Server Analysis Services (Tabular models and Multidimensional Cubes), Azure Analysis Services (Tabular Models), and Power BI Datasets hosted in the Power BI Service.

Four important types of refresh options provided in Microsoft Power BI are as follows:

Several data sources can be connected to Power BI, which is grouped into three main types:

It can import data from Excel (.xlsx, .xlxm), Power BI Desktop files (.pbix) and Comma-Separated Values (.csv).

These are a collection of related documents or files stored as a group. There are two types of content packs in Power BI:

Connectors help you connect your databases and datasets with apps, services, and data in the cloud.

A dashboard is a single-layer presentation sheet of multiple visualizations reports. The main features of the Power BI dashboard are:

Relationships between tables are defined in two ways:

No. There can be multiple inactive relationships, but only one active relationship between two tables in a Power Pivot data model. Dotted lines represent inactive relationships, and continuous lines represent active relationships.

Yes. There are two main reasons why you can have disconnected tables:

The CALCULATE function evaluates the sum of the Sales table Sales Amount column in a modified filter context. It is also the only function that allows users to modify the filter context of measures or tables.

Moving ahead, you will step up to the following Power BI Interview Questions from the Intermediate Level.

Most of the time, power BI gets assisted by the cloud to store the data. Power BI can use a desktop service. Microsoft Azure is used as the primary cloud service to store the data.

Row-level security limits the data a user can view and has access to, and it relies on filters. Users can define the rules and roles in Power BI Desktop and also publish them to Power BI Service to configure row-level security.

Users can use general formatting to make it easier for Power BI to categorize and identify data, making it considerably easier to work with.

There are three different views in Power BI, each of which serves another purpose:

Report View - In this view, users can add visualizations and additional report pages and publish the same on the portal.

Data View - In this view, data shaping can be performed using Query Editor tools.

Model View - In this view, users can manage relationships between complex datasets.

The important building blocks of Power BI are as follows:

Visualization is the process of generating charts and graphs for the representation of insights on business data.

A dataset is the collection of data used to create a visualization, such as a column of sales figures. Dataset can get combined and filtered from a variety of sources via built-in data plugins.

The final stage is the report stage. Here, there is a group of visualizations on one or more pages. For example, charts and maps are combined to make a final report.

A Power BI dashboard helps you to share a single visualization with colleagues and clients to view your final dashboard.

A tile is an individual visualization on your final dashboard or one of your charts in your final report.

The critical components of Power BI are mentioned below.

A content pack is defined as a ready-made collection of visualizations and Power BI reports using your chosen service. You'd use a content pack when you want to get up and running quickly instead of creating a report from scratch.

Bidirectional cross-filtering lets data modelers to decide how they want their Power BI Desktop filters to flow for data, using the relationships between tables. The filter context is transmitted to a second related table that exists on the other side of any given table relationship. This procedure helps data modelers solve the many-to-many issue without having to complicated DAX formulas. So, to sum it up, bidirectional cross-filtering makes the job for data modelers easier.

This is how the formula is writtenthat is, the elements that comprise it. The Syntax includes functions such as SUM (used when you want to add figures). If the Syntax isn't correct, you'll get an error message.

These are formulas that use specific values (also known as arguments) in a particular order to perform a calculation, similar to the functions in Excel. The categories of functions are date/time, time intelligence, information, logical, mathematical, statistical, text, parent/child, and others.

There are two types: row context and filter context. Row context comes into play whenever a formula has a function that applies filters to identify a single row in a table. When one or more filters are applied in a calculation that determines a result or value, the filter context comes into play.

You will use a custom visual file if the prepackaged files don't fit the needs of your business. Developers create custom visual files, and you can import them and use them in the same way as you would the prepackaged files.

A few familiar data sources are Excel, Power BI datasets, web, text, SQL server, and analysis services.

Power BI Desktop helps you to group the data in your visuals into chunks. You can, however, define your 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 Power BI final report page, a developer can resize a responsive slicer to various sizes and shapes, and the data collected in the container will be rearranged to find a match. If a visual report becomes too small to be useful, an icon representing the visual takes its place, saving space on the report page.

Query folding is used when steps defined in the Query Editor are translated into SQL and executed by the source database instead of your device. It helps with scalability and efficient processing.

M is a programming language used in Power Query as a functional, case-sensitive language similar to other programming languages and easy to use.

Visual-level filters are used to filter data within a single visualization. Page-level filters are used to work on an entire page in a report, and different pages can have various filters.

Report-level filters are used to filter all the visualizations and pages in the report.

Users can set up for an automatic refresh over data based on daily or weekly requirements. Users can schedule only one refresh maximum daily unless they have Power BI Pro. The Schedule Refresh section uses the pull-down menu choices to select a frequency, time zone, and time of day.

Power Map can display geographical visualizations. Therefore, some location data is neededfor example, city, state, country, or latitude and longitude.

Power Pivot uses the xVelocity engine. xVelocity can handle huge amounts of data, storing data in columnar databases. All data gets loaded into RAM memory when you use in-memory analytics, which boosts the processing speed.

Following are some of the important Components of SSAS:

An OLAP Engine is used to extensively run the ADHOC queries at a faster pace by the end-users

It describes data Drilling in SSAS as the process of exploring details of the data with multiple levels of granularity.

The data Slicing process in SSAS is defined as the process of storing the data in rows and columns.

Pivot Tables helps in switching between the different categories of data stored between rows and columns

Power BI is available mainly in three formats, as mentioned below.

There are three different stages in working on Power BI, as explained below.

The primary step in any business intelligence is to establish a successful connection with the data source and integrate it to extract data for processing.

The next step in business intelligence is data processing. Most of the time, the raw data also includes unexpected erroneous data, or sometimes a few data cells might be empty. The BI tool needs to interpret the missing values and inaccurate data for processing in the data processing stage.

The final stage in business intelligence is analyzing the data got from the source and presenting the insights using visually appealing graphs and interactive dashboards.

Beginners and experts prefer Power BI in business intelligence. Power BI is used mainly by the following professionals.

A business analyst is a professional who analyses the business data and represents the insights found using visually appealing graphs and dashboards

Business owners, decision-makers, or organizations use Power BI to view the insights and understand the prediction to make a business decision.

Business Developers are just software developers who get hired for business purposes to develop custom applications and dashboards to help the business process be smooth.

Advanced editor is used to view queries that Power BI is running against the data sources importing data. The query is rendered in M-code. Users wanting to view the query code select Edit Queries from the Home tab, then click on Advanced Editor to perform work on the query. Any changes get saved to Applied Steps in the Query Settings.

Gateways function as bridges between the in-house data sources and Azure Cloud Services.

There are multiple applications of Power BI; some of them are as follows:

Every individual chart or visualization report generated is collected and represented on a single screen. Such an approach is called a Power BI Dashboard. A Dashboard in Power BI is used to depict a story.

KPI is abbreviated as Key Performance Indicator. Any professional organization has teams and employees follow the KPI protocols. The organizations set up KPIs for all the employees. These KPIs act as their targets. These KPIs are compared to previous performance and analyze the progress.

Slicers are an integral part of a business report generated using Power BI. The functionality of a slicer can be considered similar to that of a filter, but, unlike a filter, a Slicer can display a visual representation of all values and users will be provided with the option to select from the available values in the slicers drop-down menu.

It is a combined solution offered to upload the reports and dashboards to the PowerBI.com website for reference. It consists of Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power Table.

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60 Power BI Interview Questions and Expert Answers for 2024 - Simplilearn