Power BI is a popular robust business intelligence tool developed by Microsoft. It is used to create interactive reports and visualizations from various data sources. To start a career in Power BI, you must gain a strong understanding of data analysis and visualization and prepare Power BI Interview Questions. Due to the increasing demand for Power BI professionals, pursuing a Power BI can be considered rewarding and lucrative.
As a Power BI professional, you can explore several high-paying career opportunities such as Data Analyst, Business Analyst, or Data Scientist in top industries like finance, healthcare, retail, and technology. Once you become a Power BI professional, you will be responsible for data analysis, modeling, report development, discovering insights, and visualization.
To build a successful Power BI career, you must have solid analytical skills, excellent communication skills, and attention to detail. Also, you need to stay updated with the latest trends and developments in Data Visualization and Data Analysis.
If you also want to embark on an exciting and rewarding Power BI career, ensure you go through these top Power BI Interview Questions. Our experienced instructors have compiled these basic to advanced-level Power BI interview questions and answers to help you get started with Power BI without any hassle.
Answer: Power BI is a business analytics tool developed by Microsoft that enables you to turn multiple unrelated data sources into valuable and interactive insights. These data may be in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or cloud-based/on-premises hybrid data warehouses. You can easily connect to all your data sources and share the insights with anyone.
Answer: Power BI provides a simple setup to connect, transform, and visualize the raw business data from multiple sources. Even non-technical users can extract valuable information from their business data and use it to make better decisions. It provides a secure cloud service that enables the user to view dashboards, reports and share them with other business users and stakeholders in real-time analysis.
Answer: Both Tableau and Power BI are the current IT industry’s data analytics and visualization giants. Yet, there are a few significant differences between them. Which are as follows:
- Power BI uses DAX for calculating measures. Whereas, Tableau uses MDX for measures and dimensions.
- Power BI is qualified only to handle a limited amount of data. While, Tableau is capable of handling large volumes of data.
- Power BI is suitable for both experts and beginners. On the other hand, Tableau is best suitable for experts.
- Power BI User Interface is comparatively simpler. Whereas, Tableau User Interface is complicated.
- Power BI finds it difficult, as its capacity to handle large volumes of data is limited. In contrast, Tableau is capable of supporting the cloud with ease.
Answer: Power BI Desktop is a free business intelligence desktop application installed on your computer. Power BI Desktop works with the Power BI service by providing advanced data exploration, shaping, modeling, and creating a report with highly interactive visualizations. By using Power BI Desktop, you can easily save your work to a file or publish your data and reports right to your Power BI site to share with others.
Answer: Power Pivot is an add-on provided by Microsoft for Excel since 2010. Power Pivot was designed to extend the analytical capabilities and services of Microsoft Excel.
Answer: Power Query is a business intelligence tool designed by Microsoft for Excel. Power Query allows you to import data from various data sources and will enable you to clean, transform and reshape your data as per the requirements. Power Query allows you to write your query once and then run it with a simple refresh.
Answer: Self-Service Business Intelligence or SSBI is an approach to data analytics that enables business users to filter, segment, and analyze their data without the in-depth technical knowledge in statistical analysis or business intelligence (BI). The motive of SSBI is to make data analytics easier for end-users to access their data and create various visuals to get better business insights. It is easy to use, and anybody who has a basic understanding of the data can create reports to build intuitive and shareable dashboards.
Answer: There are two parts of Microsoft Self-Service Business Intelligence Solution:
- Excel BI Toolkit: Excel BI Toolkit is used to allow the users to create an interactive report by importing data from different possible sources and model data according to the report’s requirement.
- Power BI: The Power BI is an online solution that enables users to share the interactive reports and queries you have created using the Excel BI Toolkit.
Answer: DAX stands for Data Analysis Expressions. It’s a collection of functions, operators, and constants used in formulas to calculate and return values. In other words, it helps you create new info from data you already have.
Answer: Custom Visuals are like any other visualizations, generated using Power BI. The only difference is that it develops the custom visuals using a custom SDK. The languages like JQuery and JavaScript are used to create custom visuals in Power BI.
Answer: Get Data is a simple icon on Power BI used to import data from the source.
Answer: Four important types of refresh options provided in Microsoft Power BI are as follows:
- Package refresh– This synchronizes your Power BI Desktop or Excel file between the Power BI service and OneDrive, or SharePoint Online.
- Model or data refresh– This refreshes the dataset within the Power BI service with data from the original data source.
- Tile refresh– This updates the cache for tile visuals every 15 minutes on the dashboard once data changes.
- Visual container refresh– This refreshes the visible container and updates the cached report visuals within a report once the data changes.
Answer: There are three main connectivity modes used in Power BI.
- SQL Server Import- An SQL Server Import is the default and most common connectivity type used in Power BI. It allows you to use the full capabilities of the Power BI Desktop.
- Direct Query- The Direct Query connection type is only available when you connect to specific data sources. In this connectivity type, Power BI will only store the metadata of the underlying data and not the actual data.
- Live Connection- With this connectivity type, it does not store data in the Power BI model. All interaction with a report using a Live Connection will directly query the existing Analysis Services model. There are only 3 data sources that support the live connection method – SQL Server Analysis Services (Tabular models and Multidimensional Cubes), Azure Analysis Services (Tabular Models), and Power BI Datasets hosted in the Power BI Service.
Answer: Relationships between tables are defined in two ways:
- Manually– Relationships between tables are manually defined using primary and foreign keys.
- Automatic– When enabled, this automated feature of Power BI detects relationships between tables and creates them automatically.
Answer: No. There can be multiple inactive relationships, but only one active relationship between two tables in a Power Pivot data model. Dotted lines represent inactive relationships, and continuous lines represent active relationships.
Answer: Yes. There are two main reasons why you can have disconnected tables:
- The table is used to present the user with parameter values to be exposed and selected in slicers
- It uses the table as a placeholder for metrics in the user interface
Answer: M is a query language formula that is used in Power BI Query Editor. It helps in preparing data before loading it into the Power BI model. The main function of Power Query is to mash-up data from one supported source to another. These data mashups are expressed with the help of Power Query M Formula Language.
Answer: Content packs are packaged reports, dashboards, and datasets, which can be shared with other Power BI users in the organization. When a content pack is connected on the Powerbi.com portal, report items are merged into workspace lists.
Answer: Power BI’s working system mainly comprises three steps:
- Data Integration: The first step is to extract and integrate the data from heterogeneous data sources. After integration, the data is converted into a standard format and stored in a common area called the staging area.
- Data Processing: Once the data is assembled and integrated, it requires some cleaning up. Raw data is not so useful therefore, a few transformation and cleaning operations are performed on the data to remove redundant values, etc. After the data is transformed, it is stored in data warehouses.
- Data Presentation: Now that the data is transformed and cleaned, it is visually presented on the Power BI desktop as reports, dashboards, or scorecards. These reports can be shared via mobile apps or web to various business users.
Answer: Visualization is a process of Power BI used to represent data in pictorial form like tables, graphs or charts based on the specific requirement.