Power BI Interview Questions

. What is Power BI?

Power BI is a collection of Business Intelligence tools, techniques, and process that is used to extract valuable information from the raw business data by connecting, transforming, and visualizing raw data sets from multiple sources. know more at Power bi online training

It provides the right tools to create interactive dashboards and live reports that can be shared and published on various platforms to help the business users and stakeholders make better decisions. With the competitive and highly categorized information, planners and decision-makers can track their performance in the market.

2. Why use Power BI?

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.

Power BI provides AI features in the form of Power Query and Power Q&A. With Power Query, you can create the dashboards by simply typing in the columns and the visual you want to include. While Power Q&A allows you to analyze your data by giving voice commands.

Small businesses can use Power BI Desktop to visualize their business data without spending their time and money in maintaining a separate team for data analysis.

3. What is the difference between Managed Enterprise BI and Self-service BI?

The limitations of Managed Enterprise BI led to the birth of Self-service BI. There are significant differences that separate them.

. What exactly is Self-service BI?

Self-service BI or Self-service Business Intelligence (SSBI) is an approach to data analytics, reporting, and visualization that enables users to generate easy-to-understand, intuitive, and actionable dashboards, almost instantaneously.

The most striking feature of SSBI is the fact that users are not required to be adept at technical expertise when it comes to data reporting. Using available filters and data manipulation options, they can influence data as per their business needs and further create reports. There are two parts to Microsoft SSBI:

• Excel BI toolkit
• Power BI

5. Why are you interested in Power BI? What makes you think that Power BI would be a great career option?

A cloud-based data reporting and visualization tool, Power BI makes it possible for users to generate reports online. Once reports are generated, users can share them with their colleagues in their workplace. This aspect of Power BI makes it quite popular among business users. And therefore, Power BI is both an interesting and promising career option. know more at Power bi training

6. Mention the important features of Power BI.

Features of Power BI are many. The most notable ones are:

• It allows users to transform data into visuals and share those visuals with colleagues.
• It allows users to explore and analyze data from all sources (in an all-in-one view).
• It allows users to scale across organizations with built-in governance and security.
• Once an output is generated, users can display the same in multiple devices that are compatible with the Power BI application.
• With Power BI natural language processing or Power BI Q&A, users can perform queries on reports using simple English words.

7. Is Power BI free to use?

Well, users can use Power BI for free. However, the best of Power BI can be availed with the Power BI Pro subscription account. This can be purchased from the Microsoft Store. The subscription account basically offers an enhanced version of several features that are available with the Power BI free account. Most business users use a subscribed account as it offers more data refreshes per day and other features as compared to the free version.

8. What are the versions of Power BI?

Power BI brings in a lot of flexibility when it comes to data reporting and visualization. For this reason, the complete Power BI package has been divided into three versions. These versions allow all kinds of users to leverage the functionalities of Power BI to the fullest.

The versions are:

• Power BI Desktop: The on-premise version for Windows 10
• Power BI Service: For publishing to the cloud
• Mobile Power BI: For mobile users

9. What is Power BI Desktop?

Power BI Desktop is a Windows desktop-based application for personal computers, primarily for designing, generating, and publishing reports to the cloud. Used as an on-premise version of Power BI, Power BI Desktop can run on PCs and work full-fledged even when the system is not connected to the Internet. Just when users want to publish their reports to the cloud or share with colleagues, they are supposed to connect to the Internet. Power BI Desktop is basically the first application that users jump into when they board on Power BI.

10. What are the major components of Power BI?

There are five different components of Power BI.

• Power Pivot: Fetches and cleans data and loads on to Power Query
• Power Query: Operates on the loaded data
• Power Q&A: Makes it possible for users to interact with reports using simple English language
• Power View: Lets users create interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals
• Power Map: Enables the processing of accurate geographic locations in datasets

11. What is the purpose of the ‘Get Data’ icon in Power BI?

When users click on the Get Data icon in Power BI, a drop-down menu appears and it shows all data sources from which data can be ingested.

Data can actually be directly ingested from any source including files in Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, and SharePoint formats and databases such as SQL, Access, SQL Server Analysis Services, Oracle, IBM, MySQL, and much more. Also, Power BI datasets and Power BI data flows are compatible. Data can also be taken in from Azure and other online sources.

12. How can we filter data in Power BI?

Data can be filtered using various filters that are available in Power BI, implicitly. There are basically three types of filters, namely, Page-level filters, Drillthrough filters, and Report-level filters.

• Drillthrough filters: With Drillthrough filters in Power BI Desktop, users can create a page in their reports that focuses on specific entities such as suppliers, customers, or manufacturers.
• Page-level filters: These are used to filter charts that are present on individual pages.
• Report-level filters: They are used to simultaneously filter charts that are present on all pages of a report.

13: How is Power BI different from other BI tools?

Power BI provides better features and data manipulation tools as compared to other BI tools like Tableau. A single user can connect with multiple data sources without any experience in coding and data analytics. As a product of Microsoft, Power BI is closely integrated with other Microsoft tools such as Office 365, SharePoint, and Bing. know more at Power bi online course

In the free version of Power BI Desktop, the user can analyze datasets of up to 1GB in storage along with 10,000 rows of data steaming every hour. Moreover, it provides features like Power Query which allows the user to easily visualize the datasets by giving the command in the natural English language.

14. Define the term ‘M language.”

It is a programming language used in Power Query. It’s a functional, case-sensitive language which is similar to other programming languages and easy to use.

15. What information is required to create a map in Power Map?

Power Map can display visualizations which are geographical in nature. That’s why some kind of location data is needed, for example, city, state, country or latitude and longitude.

16. What are the important features of Power BI dashboard?

• It allows you to drill through the page, bookmarks, and selection pane.
• It allows you to create various tiles like web content, images, textbox, and integrate URLs.
• Allows you to set report layout to mobile view.

17 What are the steps to go to Data Stories Gallery in Power Bi communities?

Steps to go to Data Stories Gallery:

• First, open PowerBI.com in a favorite browser.
• By hovering on Learn
• Click on Community
• Scroll down little, and you will find Data Stories Gallery.
• Anyone can submit her or his Data Story as well.

18. Where incremental licensing refresh feature is accessible?

Incremental refresh feature mainly used for high-end scalability of data by publishing only on that workspace in Power BI Service where Premium capacity is needed.

19. How can you analyze Power BI reports data in excel?

You need to follow the below-given steps:

• Open Power BI Admin portal, go to tenant settings and select -> Analyze.
• Check that Power BI Administrator has enabled Excel option or not.
• Then at the upper right corner, click settings to download and install Excel updates.
• Next, go to the left-hand side navigation pane, go to the workspace, click on the dataset, click on Eclipses (three dots) and select Analyze in Excel.
• Download ODC file, save, and double click on it.
• After that needs to provide power BI user id and password.

20. What is Power Pivot, and what are the filter writes in Power BI?

Power Pivot is an in-memory component which offers highly compressed data storage. It helps you to build a data model, creating formulas, relationship, calculated columns from various resources.

Filters are applicable in:

• Visualization level
• Page Level
• Report Level

21. How can you perform Dynamic filtering in Power BI?

Dynamic Filtering in Power BI is done using the following steps:

• Once all the data are set up, publish a detail report to Power BI.
• Publish it to group workspace.
• Create a filter link
• Create a DAX calculated column.
• Public overview report

22. What is Power Pivot Data Model?

It is a model that contains data writes, tables, sections, and table relations. These data tables help you to develop for holding data for a business substance.

23. What is Power Query?

Power query is an ETL tool which helps you to clean, shape, and modify data utilizing instinctive interfaces without doing anything.

24. Which programming language is used in Power Query?

M-code is a new programming language that is used in power query. It is similar to other programming languages and easy to use.

25. List out benefits of using Variables in DAX.

Here, are benefits of using DAX function:

• By declaring and evaluating a variable, the variable can be reused multiple times in a DAX expression, which helps you to avoid additional queries of the source database.
• Variables can make DAX expressions more useful and logical.
• Variables is only scoped, which should be measure or query which can’t be among measures. know more at power bi online training from india

25. What are Tiles in Power BI?

Tile is an important feature of power BI services and can be said as a picture of the data which can be pinned to the dashboard.