Power BI Interview Questions: Power BI refers to a Business-Intelligence tool that was developed by Microsoft back in 2013. This mixes numerous add-ons of Excel and builds a new & fully independent BI tool. Power-BI was the main contributing factor to Microsoft’s development in Business-Intelligence & Data Visualization around the years 2016 and 2017. Demand for skilled professionals in this tool has increased rapidly in the past years.
Moreover, this article about Power BI Questions and answers for interviews aims to prepare you for jobs and roles related to Power BI in major organizations. These interview questions below are both basic intermediate and experienced hence suitable for freshers and experienced candidates.
Power BI Interview Questions and Answer
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a development from Microsoft and combines numerous data visualization features to one. Furthermore, Power BI is a new term for data-driven industry & carries numerous opportunities on the shoulders.
What are the major parts of Power BI?
This comes like a package of 3 major parts:
- Power-BI Desktop
- Power-BI services
- Power-BI mobile application
With the three components, Power BI allows one to create some data-driven insight into your company. Depending on different roles, one can leverage Power-BI to monitor progress, integrate APIs, create reports, & more others. It also offers numerous software connectors & services.
State some advantages of using Power-BI?
- Allows users in making queries to reports using easy English words
- Enables users to change data to visuals & share them with any person
- Assist in building interactable data visualization in information centers
- Offers quick & accurate solutions
- Establishes some connections for Excel-queries & dashboards for quick analysis
What’s Self-service BI?
Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) or Self-service BI is a method to information analytics, visualization, and reporting that enables clients to generate easy-to-understand, actionable dashboards, intuitive nearly instantaneously.
The striking feature of Self-service BI is that users aren’t needed to be skilled in technical expertise when it gets to data reporting. Using the available filters & information manipulation options can influence information as per the business needs & other forms reports. The two parts of Microsoft SSBI includes:
- Power BI
- Excel BI toolkit
- Where’s the information stored in Power-BI?
- Primarily, Power-BI has 2 sources for storing data:
- Azure SQL-Database: Every metadata & system-artifacts are kept here.
- Azure Blob-Storage: When clients upload information, it’s stored here.
- They’re stored as dimensional tables or fact tables.
What’s Power-BI Desktop?
Power-BI Desktop is a free desktop application which can be fitted right at your individual computer. Power-BI Desktop operates cohesively with Power-BI service via offering improved data exploration, modelling, shaping & creating a report using more interactive visualizations. Additionally, one can save the work to file/publish your information & reports right to Power-BI site and share with anyone.
What are the main parts of Power-BI?
Power Query: It’s for data mash-up & transformation. One can use this to get information from different databases, including MySql, SQL Server, & more others. Furthermore, one can delete a mass of information from different sources.
Power View: It’s for viewing information visualizations. Its view offers an interactive display of different data sources in extracting metadata for best data analysis.
Power Pivot: Suitable for tabular data-modeling. It’s the data-modeling engine which uses a functional language known as Data-Analysis-Expression in performing the calculations. Furthermore, it also helps in creating a relationship between different tables viewed as pivot-tables.
Power BI Mobile: It’s for iOS, Android, Windows phones. This offers an interactive display of dashboards from the site onto OS easily.
Power BI Desktop: This is a companion-development tool. It’s an aggregated tool of Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View. Additionally, it creates an improved query, reports & models using a desktop tool.
Power Q&A: It’s for natural-language Q and &A
Power Map: it’s 3D geo-spatial information visualization
What’s Dax Function?
It’s a formula-expression language known as DAX and can be utilized with different visualization tools, including Power BI. Furthermore, it’s known as a purposeful language, where complete code is stored in a function.
Which are the important applications of Power BI?
It’s majorly used by:
- Business and Data Analyst
- PMO-Project Management Office
- Developer and Database Administrator
- Consumer for End-User Report
- IT Professional, IT Team
- Data Scientist
How can data be filtered in Power-BI?
Data in Power BI is filtered using different filters which are available at Power-BI, implicitly. The 3 kinds of filters available are Drillthrough filters, Report-level filters & Page-level filters.
- Page-level filters. It’s used to filter charts which are present on individual pages.
- Drillthrough filters. Has Drillthrough-filters in Power BI-Desktop. The users is allowed to create a page at their reports which focuses on certain entities like suppliers, manufacturers or customers.
- Report-level filters. This is used to concurrently filter charts which are present on every page of the report.
What are the disadvantages of using Power-BI?
- Power-Bl doesn’t combine imported data that’s retrieved from real-time links.
- Dashboards & reports just shared with clients having the same email domains.
- Dashboard doesn’t accept or pass user, other entity parameters or account
- Power BI cannot accept a file size bigger than one GB.
Significance Data sources utilized in Power-BI Desktop include:
- Database
- All
- File
- Power BI
- Online Services
- Azure
State the various connection modes that are available in Power-BI?
The three major connectivity modes in Power-BI includes.
Direct Query: Direct-Query connection kind is just available when one connects to various data sources. With this connectivity kind, Power BI just keeps the metadata of underlying information and not actual data.
SQL-Server Import: SQL-Server Import is the default & more common connectivity kind utilized in Power-BI. This enables one to utilize the complete capabilities of Power BI-Desktop.
Live Connection: This kind of connectivity data isn’t stored in the Power-BI model. Every interaction with the report using a Live-Connection query directly the existing Analysis-Services model. The three data sources which support the live-connection method includes Power BI Datasets that are hosted in Power-BI Service, Azure-Analysis Services and SQL Server Analysis Services.
Name data sources which Power-BI connect to?
Content Packs: These include a collection of associated files or documents stored as a group. It has 2 kinds of content-packs in Power-BI:
Content-packs from services-providers like Marketo, Google Analytics or Salesforce & Content packs made & shared by different users in one’s organization.
Files: Information can be imported from Excel, Comma Separated-Values and Power BI-Desktop files.
Connectors: Connectors assist one in connecting the databases & datasets with services, apps & data in the cloud.
What’s row-level security?
This restricts the information which a user views & has access to depending on filters. Additionally, it also helps in configuring row-level-security. Clients can state rules & roles in Power-BI Desktop & publish similar to Power-BI Service. Additionally, the username() function can be utilized alongside table-relationships to constrain the information to the current user.
However, allowing row-level security, a Power-BI Pro subscription account is needed, & Excel sheets can just be utilized when they’re changed to .pbix file-format.
What’s bidirectional cross-filtering concerning Power BI?
Bidirectional-cross-filtering in Power-BI Desktop enables information modellers in determining how they need filters that allow flow for information using the relationships between tables. Additionally, bidirectional cross-filtering, filter context remains propagated to some second related-table at other table relationship side. These assist data-modelers solve many-to-many issues without writing complex DAX formulas. Additionally, bidirectional cross-filtering ease the job for data-modelers.
Can one have numerous active relationships between 2 tables in one Power Pivot-data model?
No. one can have numerous inactive relationships, though just one functional relationship between 2 tables in one Power Pivot-data model. Moreover, dotted lines signify inactive relationships & continuous lines signify active relationships.
What’s CALCULATE-function in DAX?
CALCULATE function assesses the sum of Sales-table Sales Amount-column in an improved filter context. It’s just the function which enables users to modify the filter context of tables or measures.
Describe Power BI building blocks
Datasets: This a group of information used in creating a visualization like column of sales figures. Additionally, datasets can be mixed & filtered using various sources with the help of in-built connectors.
Visualizations: This is a graph, chart similar visual-representation of information.
Reports: This is a collection of visualizations on a single or numerous pages like graphs, charts & maps that can be mixed to form a report.
Tiles: This is a visualization on one’s dashboard or report. Furthermore, as a creator, one can move tiles around.
Dashboards: This allows one to share one-page visualization with others that can interact with the dashboard.
What’s a grouping and how can one use it?
Power-BI Desktop enables one to group information data to small chunks. For grouping, one needs to use the Ctrl key and click to choose numerous elements in visual. Moreover, you need to right-click any of the elements which are shown in groups-window.
What are the commonly used tasks in Query-Editor?
- Shape & combine data
- Connect to data
- Query formulas
- Pivot columns
- Create-custom columns
How does Schedule-Refresh feature operate?
One can configure automatic data refreshing of weekly or daily, & at various times. One could schedule just one refresh-maximum every day unless you’ve Power-BI Pro. In the Schedule-Refresh section, use pulldown menu-choices to choose a frequency, time-of-day and time zone.
What are the most common DAX-Functions utilized?
Some of the most commonly utilized DAX function includes
IF, OR, SWITCH, AND
SUM, MAX, MIN, AVG, DISTINCTCOUNT, COUNTROWS
ISBLANK, ISCROSSFILTERED, ISFILTERED
CALCULATE, ALL, VALUES, FILTER
NATURALLEFTEROUTERJOIN, UNION, EXCEPT, INTERSECT, NATURALINNERJOIN
VAR (Variables)
ISEMPTY, SUMMARIZECOLUMNS
MEDIAN, GEOMEAN, DATEDIFF
Which information is required to form a map in Power-Map?
Power-Map can display visualizations which are physical in nature. Thus, some variety of location information is required—for instance, city, country, state or latitude & longitude.
Why & how would one utilize a custom-visual file?
You would use a custom-visual file if a prepackaged file doesn’t fit the requirements of your business. Additionally, custom visual files are made by developers, & one will import them & use them in a similar way as pre-packaged files.
What are the steps to move to Data-Stories Gallery in Power-Bi communities?
- First, go to PowerBI.com
- Then hover on Learn
- After that, click on Community
- Scroll-down little, and you’ll get Data Stories-Gallery
- Everyone will submit their Data-Story as well
How does one analyze Power-BI reports information in excel?
- Check Power BI-Administrator has allowed Excel choice or not.
- Open Power BI-Admin portal, move to tenant-settings & choose Analyze.
- At the top right corner, click on settings to be able to download & install Excel updates.
- Download the ODC-file, save, & double-click at it.
- Move to the left-hand-side navigation pane, then move to workspace, also click on dataset and click at Eclipses to choose Analyze-in-Excel.
- After this needs to offer power BI-user id & password
How does one do dynamic filtering at Power BI?
- Dynamic-Filtering in Power-BI is done with the following steps:
- When all the information is set up, publish some detailed report to Power-BI.
- Publish on group-workspace.
- Create filter link
- Create a DAX-calculated column.
- Public summary report
- Sate term ‘M-language.”
This is a programming language that’s used in Power-Query. It is a functional and case-sensitive language that’s similar to different programming languages & simple to use.
What are some of the common data-shaping methods?
The most common data-shaping methods include
- Adding Indexes
- Removing Columns & Rows
- Applying a Sort-Order
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What’s Power-BI Designer?
This is a powerful & flexible new tool under the Power-BI umbrella. Power-BI Designer empowers clients to form intuitive reports & dashboards easily & fast & also allows users to vary visual views of the data at their fingertips for good analytics & educated decision-making. The designer remains a host of drag-&-drop capabilities, which assists users to place content the place they need it on report canvas in a good-structured layout.
Conclusion
These are just some of the questions that you can encounter when in a Power Bi Interview. However, these questions will give you the general knowledge you need when preparing for the interview.
This article contains a couple of agile interview questions that are chosen from a vast pool of likely questions. Moreover, you are likely to encounter a couple of these questions from the panel.
