Power BI Desktop Part 2: Relationships & Calculations

Target audience: This course is suitable for any user new to the subject and requires no specific knowledge or experience of Power BI. However, the session is part of a series of three and although they are all self-contained, they are most effective when taken in order. 

Following on from the first Power BI Desktop course this second session covers some more important topics – relationships between entities and calculations using DAX. One of the most powerful features of Power BI is the ability to connect tables by forming relationships between them. This requires both tables to have related fields, although not the same field names, and in this session we will look at checking the relationships in Model view. We examine a join made automatically by Power BI and add one which has not been automatically defined.

Calculations in Power BI are not quite the same as calculations in other software as they use a different method called DAX. We look at several ways of adding calculations which are called “measures”, and add the new measures to Matrix visualisations in the report. The session concludes by adding some more visualisations; a line and a pie chart, and a new visualisation not found anywhere else called a Treemap. We finish by adding a slicer.