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Power BI Interview Questions

Top 45 Power BI Interview Questions and Answers To Prepare

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In this article, we have put together some of the best Power BI interview questions that are sure to test your understanding of Power BI. If you are looking for a job in the Power BI field, these questions will help you to showcase your knowledge and skills. Power BI Interview Questions and answers are an essential part of your Power BI Interview. You need to be confident in your answers and know how to answer these questions correctly to impress the hiring manager. Depending on the role you are applying for, these might be some of your first and/or final interview questions that will decide if you’re moving forward with a job offer.

About Power Bi: Power BI is a business analytics service offered by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualizations with self-service BI capabilities, allowing users to create reports and dashboards. Power BI Desktop is a free edition that allows users to create, view, and share reports. The two editions are also not integrated; however, it does allow us from Excel VBA projects where data refreshes at a set time or user action.

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Power BI Interview Questions

1. What is Power BI?

2. How has Power BI changed the way you work with data?

3. Can you think of an example where you have used Power BI to improve your business?

4. Difference between Power Query and Power Pivot

5. What is Power BI Desktop?

6. How helpful is Power BI?

7. What is Power Pivot?

8. What is Power Query?

9. What is DAX?

10. Why would you apply general formatting to data in Power BI?

11. Explain custom visuals in Power BI

12. Tell me the way to create custom visuals in Power BI

13. GetData in Power BI

14. What is the future of Power BI?

15. What are the differences between Power BI Desktop and Power Pivot for Excel?

16. What are the key components of Power BI?

17. Explain various connectivity modes in Power BI?

18. Explain various formats in Power BI?

19. Explain the dashboard?

20. Explain different building blocks of Power BI?

21. Explain content packs in Power BI?

22. What are the different Power BI versions?

23. What are the benefits of using DAX functions?

24. What is the difference between Power BI and Tableau?

25. Explain filter in Power BI?

26. What is the variety of visualizations in Power BI?

27. What does Power BI service mean?

28. What do we mean by custom visuals in Power BI?

29. What is the variety of users who can use Power BI?

30. Explain Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI)?

31. Explain the different comprehensive working systems of Power BI?

32. Where do you reshape data in Power BI?

33. Tell me the way to refresh data in PowerBI?

34. Which is a single-page canvas that uses visualizations to tell a story?

35. What are the advantages of Power BI?

36. Tell me some common DAX Function?

37. What are the three basic principles of DAX?

38. Explain CALCULATE function in Excel?

39. Tell me the common table function for grouping data?

40. What are the advantages of using Variables in DAX?

41. Explain Power Pivot data model

42. Name the data destinations for Power Queries?

43. Name some Power Query/Editor Transforms?

44. What are the three Edit interactions that you can do with visual tiles in Power BI Desktop?

45. How can SSRS be integrated with Power BI?


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Power BI Interview Questions and Answers

1. What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business analytics service offered by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualizations with self-service BI capabilities, allowing users to create reports and dashboards. Power BI Desktop is a free edition that allows users to create, view, and share reports. The two editions are also not integrated; however, it does allow us from Excel VBA projects where data refreshes at a set time or user action.

2. How has Power BI changed the way you work with data?

The most important skill for Power BI is the ability to transform data. Once the data is transformed, it can be loaded into Power BI for analysis. The data can be transformed in a number of ways, including the use of Power Query and Power Pivot.

3. Can you think of an example where you have used Power BI to improve your business?

An example of a business that has used Power BI is Walmart. Walmart used Power BI to improve the way that it tracks inventory. Walmart was able to reduce the amount of inventory that it had on hand by using Power BI to track inventory levels. By using this method, Walmart was able to identify when shortages were occurring within their organization so they could make quick changes to their inventory.

4. Difference between Power Query and Power Pivot

There are a few key differences between Power Query and Power Pivot.

  • Power Query is used to transforming data, while Power Pivot is used to model data.
  • Power Query is used to load data into Power BI, while Power Pivot can be used to create tables and charts.
  • Power Query is used to create data models, while Power Pivot is used to analyze data models.
  • Power Query is used to load data into memory, while Power Pivot can be used to generate reports from multiple sources at once without having local copies in memory or writing them out at all (the output gets copied/written out every time).

5. What is Power BI Desktop?

Power BI Desktop is a stand-alone product that allows users to create interactive reports and dashboards. Reports and dashboards can be created by connecting to data sources, such as Excel files, SQL Server databases, and Azure cloud services. Reports and dashboards can also be created by using Scripts, which is a type of program that automates tasks in Power BI.

6. How helpful is Power BI?

Power BI is a data analysis and visualization tool that can be helpful for businesses of all sizes. It allows users to quickly and easily create reports, charts, and dashboards that can help them understand their data in a more comprehensive way.

Some of the benefits of using Power BI include:

  • It is easy to use and requires no programming knowledge.
  • It provides users with a variety of powerful reporting options, including drill-down capabilities that make it easy to find specific information.
  • It is versatile enough to be used for a wide range of business needs, including marketing, sales, finance, and operations.
  • It can be integrated with other software applications so that it can work as part of a larger system.

7. What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot is a data analysis tool that is used to model data. Models can be created by connecting to data sources, such as Excel files, SQL Server databases, and Azure cloud services. Models can also be created by using Scripts, which is a type of program that automates tasks in Power Pivot. Models can be used to analyze data, create reports, and generate charts.

8. What is Power Query?

Power Query is a data transformation tool that is used to transform data. It works with an application called Data Transform Propertiesdata flow framework (aka DTP) found under Modeling Data tab > Get & Transform> Advanced options section on the ribbon bar for any Tableau dashboard report or table view layout. This connection uses JavaScript Object Notation scripting language known worldwide under its alias “Json” format so it will take a little getting used to if coming from a more conventional ETL tool background.

9. What is DAX?

DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a formula language that is used to create calculations and measures in Power Pivot models. DAX formulas can be used to calculate values, compare data, and create relationships between data sources. DAX makes sure you use your data in the most meaningful way and produce thoughtful reports. DAX is a functional language with conditional statements, closures, inline functions, and a lot more. The formulas can be numerical, decimal, or string.

10. Why would you apply general formatting to data in Power BI?

When you apply general formatting to data in Power BI, you are able to make the data more readable and understandable. This can help you make better decisions by making it easier to understand the data.

Some of the benefits of general formatting include:

• It makes it easier to find specific information in the data.

• It makes it easier to compare different pieces of data.

• It makes it easier to understand how the data is related to each other.

11. Explain custom visuals in Power BI

Another great feature of Power BI is the ability to use custom visuals. Custom visuals are add-ins that allow users to extend the capabilities of their reports by adding new types of charts and graphs. There are already a large number of custom visuals available on the Power BI Gallery, and more are being added all the time! You can also create your own custom visuals using the Power BI Desktop.

12. Tell me the way to create custom visuals in Power BI

To create a custom visual, you first need to create an HTML file that contains the code for your visual. You can then use the Power BI Desktop to create a package that contains your HTML file and other resources needed by the custom visual, which will ultimately make it fully functional on any computer running Windows 7+ (and possibly macOS+). This means if someone else gets hold of this project package via DropBox etc. then the developer could open it up and start using it immediately!

13. GetData in Power BI

GetData is a command-line tool that allows you to import data into Power BI Desktop from a variety of sources. For example? Let’s say suppose I want to find out how many orders were processed during 2017? I could use the GetData tool to import my data from a text file, and then create a report based on that data.

14. What is the future of Power BI?

Power BI is a data analysis and visualization tool that is used by businesses to gain insights into their data. It is currently one of the most popular tools in the market and is expected to continue growing in popularity in the future.

Some of the benefits of using Power BI include:

• It is easy to use and can be integrated with other applications such as Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint.

• It has a wide range of features that allow you to visualize your data in a variety of ways.

• It can be used to create reports, dashboards, or interactive visualizations.

15. What are the differences between Power BI Desktop and Power Pivot for Excel?

  • It provides bi-directional cross-filtering relationships, security, calculated tables, and Direct Query options.
  • Power Pivot for Excel is able to handle a single direction relationship as well as calculated columns. Security roles cannot be defined in Power Pivot for Excel.

16. What are the key components of Power BI?

  • Power Query helps you transform your data into numerous formats, like relational databases, databases in Excel spreadsheets, or even XML files.
  • Power Pivot for tabular data modeling in Microsoft Office 365 is an analytical tool used by professionals. The Power Pivot for tabular data modeling lets you build complex queries quickly and easily. It is like the pivot table of one table in relation to other tables.
  • Power Map (3D geo-spatial data visualization)
  • Power View (for viewing data visualizations): With the Power View, you can use any data source and sort it by the properties that you choose.
  • Power Q&A (for natural language Q&A)
  • Power BI Desktop is a free tool offered by Microsoft that can be used with other Power BI products to perform data analysis and reporting. You can build advanced queries, models, and reports on the desktop version.
  • Power BI for Mobile - Android, iOS and Windows smartphones provides an interactive display of dashboards from your website onto your mobile device.

17. Explain various connectivity modes in Power BI?

The three major connectivity modes in Power BI are:

Direct Query: The ability of Direct Connection allows you to create connections between Power BI reports and any valid SQL Server database. The data is not stored in Power BI; it’s stored in the SQL Server. Finally, when using Direct Connection, Power BI will only stores the metadata of the data tables included in the sources for the data query are:

  • Amazon Redshift
  • Azure HDInsight Spark (Beta)
  • Azure SQL Database
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse
  • IBM Netezza (Beta)
  • Impala (version 2.x)
  • Oracle Database (version 12 and above)
  • SAP Business Warehouse (Beta)
  • SAP HANA
  • Snowflake
  • Spark (Beta) (version 0.9 and above)
  • SQL Server
  • Teradata Database

Live Connection: The direct query and live connection methods are the same since they both do not store any data in Power BI. The results of the direct query method are not as accurate as with the method using supported data sources connected through a live connection:

  • SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Tabular
  • SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Multi-Dimensional
  • Power BI Service

Import Data (Scheduled Refresh): When you open the download window for your import data, you’re actually uploading the data to Power BI. This is a heavy process because it requires your Power BI desktop to utilize all of its available memory space. You can upload as much as 1 GB of files with the third option.

18. Explain various formats in Power BI?

Power BI is available in various formats:

  • Power BI desktop: For the desktop version
  • Power BI mobile app: For using the visualizations on mobile OS and share it
  • Power BI services: For online SaaS

19. Explain the dashboard?

The dashboard serves as a single page, on which a variety of things are combined together to make reports. The data from the reports that make up the story is what’s actually worth writing.

The dashboard has Tiles in it. You can use them to pin your reports to the dashboard. You can click any element in the dashboard to display the report of a particular data set.

20. Explain different building blocks of Power BI?

The major building blocks of Power BI are:

Datasets: Data sets are collections of data that can be gathered from various sources like SQL Server, Azure, Text, Oracle, XML, JSON, and many more. With Power BI’s GetData feature, you can easily pull data from any data source.

Visualizations: The visual aesthetic representation of data as charts, maps, or tables is known as visualization.

Reports: A report is a formal document or publication that presents a large collection of data in an organized and useful manner. Reports are an essential tool for understanding the relationships between different elements within a dataset.

Dashboards: A dashboard is a single page of data, with various tools for viewing and manipulating it. Every tab of the dashboard can be a different section, a listing of a

Tiles: They are single-block containing visualizations of a report. They allow you to distinguish your reports.

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Power BI Interview Questions and Answers

21. Explain content packs in Power BI?

Content packs are bundles of Power BI objects like reports, dashboards, and datasets. There are two types of content packs:

Service provider content packs: Other business services providers include Google Analytics, Salesforce, etc.

User-created content packs: Users can create their content package and share it within the business.

22. What are the different Power BI versions?

The three major versions of Power BI are as follows:

Power BI Desktop: Enter your information and save time by using this new tool to connect and transform large amounts of data.

Power BI Premium: The premium version is intended for larger companies that have a very large capacity to store files. The data warehouse can support up to 100TB in storage capacity using 50GB of disk space. The total cost is $4,995 per month.

Power BI Pro: For a limited time, the app allows users to get their own personalized Power BI dashboard, as well as unlimited access to reports and the ability to share them with other users. You have a storage limit of 10 GB per user.

23. What are the benefits of using DAX functions?

DAX isn’t just a part of Power BI; it’s more like a full-fledged language. If you learn DAX, you’ll become a better data professional. DAS is based on multiple nested filters that have a powerful effect on the performance of data merging, modeling, and filtering tables.

24. What is the difference between Power BI and Tableau?

The biggest difference between Power BI and Tableau is:

  • While Power BI uses DAX for calculating columns of a table, Tableau uses MDX (Multidimensional Expressions).
  • It has been proven that Tableau works better when handling large amounts of data, while Power BI has limitations and can only handle a very small number
  • Tableau is more difficult to use than Microsoft Power BI.

25. Explain filter in Power BI?

A filter sorts data according to certain conditions and enables you to see only certain values or properties. You can choose which columns to display within a page, table, or chart. For instance, it will supply sales reports from the year 2019 in India. Power BI can change a report based on the filters you have created. Several types of filters are available. :

  • Page-level filters: They can be applied to different pages from those included in the report.
  • Visualization-level filters: These symbols are often used for both data and calculations of visualizations.
  • Report-level filters: All of this applies to the report.

26. What is the variety of visualizations in Power BI?

Visualization is a way of representing data in a graph-like format. It’s used to produce reports and dashboards. You can use different types of charts in Power BI to track information about the business. A Bar chart is an alternative to a line chart. Power BI also allows you to create other types of charts and graphs that are different from what you might have seen in other applications. Examples include a donut chart, a waterfall chart, a pie chart, a table, a funnel chart, a gauge chart, a map, and many more.

27. What does Power BI service mean?

Power BI offers various services in its cloud-based business analytics platform. With these services, you can easily view and share reports via the Power BI website. Power BI is a web-based tool that offers data visualization in the form of reports. PowerBI.com is often referenced as Power BI and it is also known as Power BI workspace, Power BI site, or Power BI portal.

28. What do we mean by custom visuals in Power BI?

With Power BI visuals, you can use custom visuals to create visualizations that don’t exist in the default chart gallery. As of now, Developers have not started to create it from scratch using JavaScript and jQuery. When the page is completely done, it will be reviewed. The files are then packaged in a .pbiviz format and shared with the organization.

29. What is the variety of users who can use Power BI?

Anybody and everybody can use PowerBI. However, only a limited number of people will use PowerBI for the reason that:

  • Business Users: A business user must always remain vigilant about data and will watch all the reports for useful information.
  • Business Analysts: Some analysts take their computer systems as well as their analysts to work on. Data analysis requires close attention in order to capture the important information inside the reports.
  • Developers: When you are building a custom application for Power BI, it is always important to include the graphics that you desire.
  • Professionals: They use Power BI to check if their data is scalable, secure, and available.

30. Explain Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI)?

SSBI (Statistical Science Business Intelligence) is a software system that allows business users to be able to browse through and search, filter and sort through their data, without any programming skills. SSBI also allows users to download all the reports and visuals available in SSBI account in one click. Anybody with some understanding of the data can make reports to build intuitive dashboards.

31. Explain the different comprehensive working systems of Power BI?

Data Importing: The first thing you need to do is to import the data and prepare it for export, putting it into a staging area.

Data Cleaning: The first step in creating an interactive map is to collect data. It is necessary to clean the data after collecting them.

Data Visualization: With the release of the new Power BI Desktop, users can now bring in data from external sources to create reports and dashboards and enhance the graphical representation of data.

Save and Publish: Once your report is ready to use, it can be published to any site for use by users of all kinds, through the internet or mobile devices.

32. Where do you reshape data in Power BI?

In Data Editing you can reshape the data of PowerBI.

33. Tell me the way to refresh data in PowerBI?

In the Gateway, the data can be refreshed in PowerBI by scheduling refresh.

34. Which is a single-page canvas that uses visualizations to tell a story?

A Power BI service dashboard is a one-page canvas, which makes use of visualizations to tell a story.

35. What are the advantages of Power BI?

  • PowerBI can manage a lot of data.
  • Information can be visualized using powerful templates and visualizations.
  • They get cutting-edge intelligence technology and powerful algorithms that are updated on a regular basis.
  • Users can have their own customized dashboards that are accessible and understandable.
  • Users can perform queries on DAX reports.

36. Tell me some common DAX Function?

Some of the most common DAX function used is:

  • SUM, MIN, MAX, AVG, COUNTROWS, DISTINCTCOUNT
  • IF, AND, OR, SWITCH
  • ISBLANK, ISFILTERED, ISCROSSFILTERED
  • VALUES, ALL, FILTER, CALCULATE,
  • UNION, INTERSECT, EXCEPT, NATURALINNERJOIN, NATURALLEFTEROUTERJOIN,
  • SUMMARIZECOLUMNS, ISEMPTY,
  • VAR (Variables)
  • GEOMEAN, MEDIAN, DATEDIFF

37. What are the three basic principles of DAX?

Syntax: Syntax is the formula that comprises the functions. If the syntax of your program isn’t correct, it will result in an error.

Functions: Functions have the capability of performing an action. It is better to calculate the proper order for carrying out a function.

Context: Row context is typically used when the result needs to be filtered, such as when a function is applied against it. There are two main types of context: Filter Context and Row Context. In this case, Row Context is being used. The FilterContext object contains the query string and filter functions, which allows you to apply different kinds of filters at the same time.

38. Explain CALCULATE function in Excel?

The CALCULATE function is used to determine the sum of a column from any table. A set of filters can be applied to calculate another value, rather than determining if only one or more conditions are true or not true for each cell.

Syntax:

CALCULATE ( [, [, [, … ] ] ] )

Expression: The expression to be evaluated.

Filter: A boolean (True/False) expression or a table expression that defines a filter.

39. Tell me the common table function for grouping data?

SUMMARIZE()

  • Main groupby function in SSAS.
  • If you’d like to list the columns but not include the metrics, use the ADDCOLUMNS function.

SUMMARIZECOLUMNS

  • New group by function for SSAS and Power BI Desktop; more efficient.
  • Specify group by columns, table, and expressions.

40. What are the advantages of using Variables in DAX?

DAX is a statistical modeling tool that enables users to generate calculated columns and/or measures for faster calculations to lower the volume of data that needs to be retrieved and visualized.

41. Explain Power Pivot data model

A database design is one where data tables contain data types, tables, columns, and table relations. Such a design is typically used to hold information for a company.

42. Name the data destinations for Power Queries?

There are two destinations we can get from the power query:

  • Load to a table in a worksheet.
  • Load to the Excel Data Model.

43. Name some Power Query/Editor Transforms?

Filtering Rows, Changing Data Types, Grouping, Choosing/Removing Columns, Adding new Columns, Splitting a column into multiple columns, etc. are some common Power Query/Editor Transforms.

44. What are the three Edit interactions that you can do with visual tiles in Power BI Desktop?

The 3 edit interaction options are Filter, Highlight, and None.

Filter: It filter a visual/tile on the basis of filter selection of another visual/tile.

Highlight: It remove everything but the related elements on a visual/tile.

None: It ignores the filter selection made by another tile/visual.

45. How can SSRS be integrated with Power BI?

Below are some examples of how you can integrate SSRS with Power BI:

  • You can pin charts and other Power BI report items on the dashboard.
  • Clicking the tile of a dashboard brings the user to the SSRS report in Power BI.
  • A subscription has been created in order to refresh the dashboard tile.
  • Power BI reports will soon be available through SSRS.

We’ve compiled a list (with answers) for each Power BI Interview Question so that there is no need to memorize them all! This is to say that there May be additional questions that we did not cover, so do feel free to comment away if you have a question about certain ones.

Let us know your thoughts on this article, any ideas for improvement, or anything else you think would benefit the community through the comments below.


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