Learning on-the-fly is not the best option
One of the benefits of Power BI is the wealth of support available from Microsoft. Directly from the Help menu in the Power BI Desktop ribbon, you can access a range of different resources, each of which links to web or YouTube pages updated with the latest content.
The Help menu is a convenient one-stop-shop to access support, but the volume of information is considerable and it’s not easy for a newcomer to plot a course through it.
It’s tempting to dive in and try to learn through experimentation and trial-and-error. This was the approach I took when I first started to learn Power BI. I had the notion that “Guided Learning” would take too long and felt that “Documentation” was the right place to start. Clicking on this option took me to an article within the formal Power BI documentation, “Get started with Power BI desktop”. A twenty-minute read that I followed up with an introductory tutorial I found on YouTube (can’t recall which one specifically) and I was good to go, or so I thought.
I pulled data in from Excel and started dropping visuals onto the page. It was quite a revelation for me to be able to add to my data in Excel and refresh my visuals in Power BI. This dynamic nature of updating reports and dashboards was not familiar to me. (I wouldn’t want to add up the hours I’ve spent in the past updating data in Excel and then copying and pasting graphs in PowerPoint).
So I was hooked on Power BI straight away. But I wasn’t aware of how much I was neglecting the functionality within. Here are some of the mistakes or oversights I made: