🎯 What You'll Learn
- Connect Power BI to web pages, Excel, CSV, and built-in sample data
- Clean and transform data using Power Query Editor
- Create measures using basic DAX formulas like
SUM() - Build 7 types of visuals: Treemap, Pie, Filled Map, Line Chart, Gauge, Bar Chart, and Table
- Apply conditional formatting, Top N filters, and date intelligence with CALENDARAUTO()
📋 Before You Begin
- Power BI Desktop installed (free from Microsoft Store or powerbi.microsoft.com)
- Basic understanding of what rows and columns are in a spreadsheet
- A Microsoft account (free) for saving reports to Power BI Service
- No coding experience needed — this part is 100% click-based
⚙️ The Four Pillars of Power BI
Every Power BI project — from a simple personal budget to an enterprise dashboard — passes through these four stages. Think of them as the production line for your data.
Get Data
Connect to Excel, Web, SQL, APIs, PDFs and 100+ sources
Clean Data
Use Power Query to remove errors, fix types & reshape tables
Model
Link tables with relationships and write DAX measures
Visualise
Build charts, cards, maps and interactive reports
🏋️ 10 Hands-On Exercises
Click any exercise to expand it. Each one focuses on a specific Power BI skill.
1
The "Top 50" Wikipedia Scrape
SOURCEGet Data → Web → Search Wikipedia for "List of most-followed Instagram accounts"
TASKOpen Power Query. Remove the "Rank" column. Change the "Followers" column type to Decimal Number.
GOALCreate a Treemap visual — accounts are sized by their follower count. Bigger box = more followers.
Get DataClean DataVisualise
2
The Personal Finance Tracker
SOURCEGet Data → Excel → Create a sheet with columns: Date, Category (Food/Rent/Fun), Amount
TASKAdd a Slicer visual linked to the Month. Use it to filter the report interactively.
GOALA Pie Chart showing spending by category. Clicking months in the Slicer updates the chart.
Get DataVisualise
3
World Population Map
SOURCEGet Data → Web → Wikipedia "List of countries by population"
TASKUse the "Extract Table from Examples" feature to pull Country Name and Population columns automatically.
GOALA Filled Map visual — countries are shaded darker based on population size.
Get DataVisualise
4
Sales Performance (Sample Data)
SOURCEOpen Power BI → Splash screen → "Try a sample dataset" → Load the Financials table
TASKRight-click the Financials table → New Measure. Type:
Total Profit = SUM(Financials[Profit])GOALA Line Chart with Month Name on the X-axis and your Total Profit measure on the Y-axis.
Model (DAX)Visualise
5
Your Own Media Library
SOURCEGet Data → Text/CSV → Use Spotify Wrapped export, a book list, or movies you've watched
TASKIn Power Query, use Split Column on a "Genre" field that has multiple values (e.g., "Action, Comedy" → two rows).
GOALA Card Visual showing the total count of items in your library. Simple but satisfying!
Get DataClean DataVisualise
6
The Weather Comparison
SOURCEFind a historical weather CSV (try WeatherSpark or Kaggle climate datasets)
TASKUse the Filter Pane to show only months June, July, and August. This is a visual-level filter — not Power Query.
GOALA Gauge Visual showing average summer temperature. Set the "Target" value to 25°C as your benchmark.
Visualise
7
The "Top 10" Ranking Exercise
SOURCEGet Data → Web → Wikipedia "List of tallest buildings"
TASKIn the Visualizations pane → Filters → Top N. Set it to show only the Top 10 based on Height in metres.
GOALA Clustered Bar Chart showing the 10 tallest buildings. Sorted descending by height.
Visualise
8
Conditional Formatting Challenge
SOURCEReuse the Financials sample data from Exercise 4
TASKCreate a Table Visual. In Format (paintbrush icon) → Cell elements → turn on Background Color for the "Profit" column.
GOALNegative profit values show in red, positive in green. A heat-map style table.
Visualise
9
Building a Date Table
SOURCEAny dataset with a Date column (Financials works great)
TASKIn Table View, click New Table and type:
Calendar = CALENDARAUTO(). DAX generates every date automatically.GOALIn Model View, drag Date from Calendar to Date in your data table to create a relationship. This unlocks time intelligence.
Model (DAX)
10
The Multi-Page Report
SOURCECombine any two datasets from the exercises above
TASKRename Page 1 to "Executive Summary" and Page 2 to "Deep Dive" by double-clicking the page tab.
GOALInsert → Buttons → Navigator → Page Navigator — a clickable button bar appears so users can jump between report pages.
Visualise
💡 Pro Tip: The Undo button (Ctrl + Z) is your best friend in Power BI. Don't be afraid to click buttons in the Format Pane — you can't break the data, you're only changing how it looks!
🧠 Practice Quiz
Q1. You import a Wikipedia table and the "Population" column shows as Text. What do you do?
Q2. Which DAX formula would you write to create a "Total Profit" measure?
Q3. In the Conditional Formatting exercise, where do you find the "Background Color" option?
Q4. What does CALENDARAUTO() do when used in a New Table?
Q5. To show only the "Top 10" tallest buildings in a chart, which feature do you use?
0/5
See how you did!
🏁 Key Takeaways — Part 1
- Power BI has four stages for every project: Get → Clean → Model → Visualise
- Power Query is your data workshop — always fix data types before building visuals
- DAX Measures (like
SUM()) are calculated on the fly and are more powerful than fixed columns - A
CALENDARAUTO()date table is the foundation of any time-based analysis - The Format Pane controls everything visual — explore it freely, Ctrl+Z has your back
- Part 2 will connect Power BI to live databases, APIs, and cloud services