Power BI, a business intelligence platform developed by Microsoft, was first released in 2011. It has since become a popular and widely used tool for data analysis, visualization, and reporting.
Power BI offers a user-friendly interface and powerful capabilities, enabling users to connect to various data sources, transform data, and create interactive dashboards and reports.
Key features and capabilities of Power BI include:
- Data connectivity: Power BI can connect to a wide range of data sources, including Excel spreadsheets, databases, cloud services, and on-premises data warehouses.
- Data transformation: Users can clean, transform, and prepare data for analysis using Power Query, a powerful data integration tool.
- Data visualization: Power BI offers a rich set of visualizations, including charts, graphs, maps, and custom visuals, to help users understand and communicate data insights effectively.
- Natural language query: Power BI’s natural language query feature allows users to ask questions in plain English and get instant results.
- Collaboration and sharing: Power BI enables users to collaborate on reports, share dashboards with colleagues, and embed dashboards into websites or applications.
Power BI has gained significant popularity due to its ease of use, powerful features, and seamless integration with other Microsoft products. It has become a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes, helping them make data-driven decisions and gain insights into their operations.
If you are planning to embark on the career path of Power BI developers, besides skill-building and learning, you would need to prepare for the interviews that need to be cracked so you can get a job. Cracking the Power BI job interviews unlocks a world of opportunities for you and can help you climb the first step to a long, flourishing corporate ladder in Power BI careers.
The basic tenets of being confident, being honest, getting the fundamentals right, etc. always apply, irrespective of which job you are interviewing for. Remembering everything you learned in your Power BI training is important. Besides that, there are some common interview questions that you can prepare for when giving interviews for Power BI developer jobs. Here is a list of some of them to help you with your interview prep.
- How is Power BI an effective solution for data visualization & business analysis?Power BI, a business intelligence platform developed by Microsoft, offers a robust set of features that make it an effective tool for data visualization and analysis. It has an intuitive, user-friendly interface which is easy to use even for users without any technical background. Power BI can connect with various data sources, transform data, and create visually appealing dashboards and reports. It offers a wide range of visualizations – charts, graphs, maps, and custom visuals to suit every kind of data and every requirement. Power BI can handle natural language queries making it very easy for users to ask questions in plain English and eliminating the need for writing complex SQL queries. It offers powerful data integration and transformation capabilities. Besides, it fosters collaboration and supports data-based decision-making. All these aspects make Power BI a very effective and useful solution for data visualization and business analysis.
- Which data sources can connect with Power BI?Power BI has the capability to connect with a wide range of data sources and formats. It can take .xlsx, .csv, .pbix, .xml, .txt as well as database files like SQL database, SQL data warehouse, and Spark on Azure HDInsight. It can also form content packets like Google Analytics or Twilio.
- What are the available views in Power BI?There are three available views in Power BI:
- The data view to see the data after it has been fed to the model, which is useful for curating, exploring, and viewing data tables
- The model view for breaking complex models into simplified diagrams or set properties for the models, which is useful for see all the tables along with their complex relationships
- The report view for creating different reports, providing visualizations, merging reports, and applying functionalities, which is useful for seeing the tables in an interactive format for simplifying data analysis
- Where does Power BI store all the data?Power BI will store data in one of the two major destinations:
- All the user-uploaded data gets stored in the Azure Blob Storage
- All the metadata and system artifacts get stores in the Azure SQL Database
- What connectivity modes are offered by Power BI?There are three major connectivity modes offered by Power BI:
- Direct query allows a direct connection to the Power BI model. Here, the data doesn’t get stored in Power BI, only the metadata of the data tables will be stored, actual data will not be stored.
- Live connection, similar to direct query also doesn’t actual data in Power BI. Live connection is a direct connection to the analysis service model. It offers significantly lesser data sources than a direct query.
- Import data or scheduled refresh unlike the other two, permits the uploading of data to Power BI and it would consume the memory space in Power BI.
The choice of model would depend on the requirement at hand and the purpose of the requirement.
- What are the refresh options in Power BI?Power BI offers four refresh options:
- Package/OneDrive Refresh that synchronizes the Power BI desktop or the Excel file between Power BI and OneDrive
- Data/Model Refresh involves scheduling the data import from all the sources based on either refresh schedule or on-demand
- Tile Refresh that refreshes the tiles’ cache on the dashboard every time there is a change in the data
- Visual Container Refresh updates the visuals and the visual container once the data changes
- What would you say are the main components of Power BI?Power BI is an amalgamation of multiple components. These are:
- Power Query
- Power View
- Power BI Desktop
- Power BI Website
- Power Pivot
- Power Map
- Power Q&A
- Power BI Mobile Apps
- What is DAX?DAX stands for Data Analysis Expression. It is a library of formulas. It is useful for carrying out different calculations and data analysis. DAX has functions, constants, operators. Using DAX, you could use the data set to their full potential and build insightful reports. Besides, DAX is a functional language that has conditional statements, nested functions, value references, etc.
- How is Power BI different from Tableau?Power BI and Tableau both make great tools for working with data. However, there are some clear differences between the two. For example, Power BI uses DAX to calculate the columns of the table while Tableau uses MDX or multi-dimensional expressions. Power BI can handle a limited amount of data while Tableau is perfectly suited even for incredibly large amounts of data. However, Tableau is more challenging to use than Power BI.
- What filters can you use in Power Bi to view specific parts of fields of a report or extract the required information?There are three filters that can be used in Power BI. First is the page-level filters that are applied to particular pages in a multi-page report. Second is the visualization-level filters that are applied to both the data and the calculation conditions for specific visualizations. And lastly, there is report-level filters which are applied to the entire report.
These are the top ten questions interviewers ask when interviewing for Power BI positions. Besides this, there are many, many more questions that can asked so always brush up on the fundamentals.
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Power BI is now one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing business intelligence clouds. Microsoft was named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for analytics and business intelligence solutions for the 14th year in a row.
Cognixia’s Power BI certification course looks at the many methodologies and best practices for modeling, analyzing, and visualizing data using Power BI that follow business and technical needs.
