Whether its a customer wanting to set up some Power BI dashboards or trying to figure out how to get data out of my own company's Power BI 'dataset' there can be some hurdles.
When I jumped into PowerBI, I was overwhelmed. Its easy to create reports when you know the application as well as the data that you need to pull from. Problem is, if you don't know the data, you can't get very far.
I can figure out how to create BI if I know the table structure and have an idea of what the tables are and how they link together (Figure 1). But if I don't, what now? I can click on these fields one by one and see them in PowerBI UI but I don't have the freedom to copy and paste the data for further analysis.
I export the datasets to Excel (where I'm more comfortable) and use PowerPivot type concepts through the below. I'll go one by one and see the data and how they interact with the other datasets to really learn what we have at our disposal.
Hopefully this short but sweet technique will help get you up and rolling with your Power BI data.
