Beginning Power BI for Business Users

5Preparing Data

In Chapter 4, “Building Your First Report,” you built a report using a prebuilt dataset. That helped us ramp up your Power BI skills quickly! However, as I mentioned in that chapter, the first step in our proven method is to prepare your data. In this chapter, we're going to dive into a tool built into Power BI Desktop that will help you prepare your data for your data model. Power Query is the go-to tool for you if the data you are bringing into your data model is not ready for analysis.

What do I mean by “not ready?” Oftentimes the data available to you either is organized in a way that isn't conducive to analysis or is messy. By messy, it may have all kinds of inconsistencies, especially if the data has been manually entered. There's an old phrase you might be familiar with: “garbage in, garbage out.” That is what the preparing of data is all about. It's about making sure that what you're sending into your data model is clean, consistent, and clearly understood. By doing that you'll have a much better chance of turning your data into real insights.

In this chapter, we'll look at two different sources of real data that need some help before they can be useful to us in Power BI. (Frankly, they'd need some help even if you were going to use them in a tool like Excel.)

GDP DATA

The first source of data we'll look at is gross domestic product (GDP) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce. This data is updated on a monthly ...