Through my Power BI training programs and these are the best lessons that I have learned that you need to master Power BI. My name is Avi Singh. I'm a Microsoft MVP and a best selling Power Bi author and if you want to become a Power BI pro make sure to subscribe and click that bell so you are notified.
Whenever we go live to answer your Power BI questions. So again as I said these are the lessons that we have uh used inside our learn Power BI family and the single goal of that program and for the steps I'm going to describe in this video are to get you from learning to doing so.
Let's get started. With step number one now when it comes to power bi a lot of people try learning power bi through what i call the jigsaw puzzle of google and youtube now here's the thing that this approach can and does work in some other settings now i come from an excel background and excel is a.
Great example where of you can easily learn it through the jigsaw puzzle of google and youtube and excel uh you can just look over somebody's shoulders see what they're doing and that's one more trick up your sleeve power bi unfortunately doesn't quite work that way.
Now here's the other thing about these core concepts so again if you tried learning through google and youtube you realize that it's nearly impossible to master these concepts to piece it together it's very frustrating and can take a long time so the rule one here is that you do want these core concepts.
This core knowledge to be pushed to you what does that mean it means that it's best if it comes through a structured program now again i'm not saying join my program although our program is built around uh you know really this focus on these core concepts but find.
Any teacher any any structured program out there uh could be video based could be a book uh which works for you and which gives you that 20 core concept so again instead of trying to piece it together you know you have it pushed to you so that's the step one now step two is actually the missing step which i.
Only recently discovered and we're going to talk about it later so let's go to step three get real now what am i talking about here now what i'll say is if you really want to learn power bi you have to apply it if you want to go from learning to do learning to doing you gotta apply what.
You're learning and for that you need two things make sure you have both ingredients the first is real data now of course inside my class i teach using sample data right there is adventurers there's contoso and all of that but guess what real data is always messy data and that's what i love about real data.
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So you need that exposure you need that experience - ID Card Make
But this is where a lot of people go wrong they miss the second key ingredient in this which is you need a real client now when i say client it doesn't have to be it could be internal or external so you could be working as an employee or a.Consultant or of course a freelancer or intern or anything like that but you have to be working with a real client now working without a real client so imagine you there's a lot of real data out there you can just go out to websites and just download real data sets but that is like trying to learn tennis.
When all you're doing is hitting the ball against the wall you're going to get really good at hitting the ball against the wall but you're not really learning tennis if you want to learn tennis you have to play with a partner you have to have that.
Back and forth and that's what's most crucial about this getting this real practice so make sure you have real data and make sure you're working with a real client because power bi as i often talk about is like peeling an onion and you want that experience to peel that onion go layer by layer.
With your bi we're gonna talk more about that in step five as well so let's talk about step four now hey uh we talked about this 80 20 rule which definitely does apply the twenty percent core concepts give you the eighty percent of the results but then of course the next question is.
What about the rest of the eighty percent of the knowledge do i not need it should i not care about it well of course you need it you should care about it but this is again where a lot of people go wrong which is they go on this endless quest to acquire that 80 percent of knowledge now you realize that power bi is knowledge or knowledge in.
Any domain is near limitless so their experience becomes this frustrating experience of climbing one sand dune after the next and in fact they get caught in what i call the learning paradox which is the more they learn the less they feel they know and i have been trapped in this and if you have felt this thing.
Let me know so i've had people who've been in learning mode for years because they feel that they're not done the more they learn they're like oh my god i don't know this i don't know that now that can be extremely frustrating and not just that it takes you away from your real purpose of serving others using your power bi knowledge.
So how do you get out of this paradox how do you get out of this trap now there are a few different ways but i'm going to give you one which is to realize that the 80 percent of the learning it's best to pull that to you when you need it so again this contrasts that with the 20 core concepts which should.
Be pushed to you somebody should just give it to you but imagine if there
Was a uh you know kind of a reference manual with all the remaining eighty percent of power bi knowledge oh god it'll be a pretty fat book but people are often trying to read that book they're trying to go out there and get this information there.Well it's best to pull it when you need it and so i'm going to talk about just in time versus just in case learning but one connection that i want to make for you is that this only works if you have mastered the 20 core concepts if you have mastered the 20 person core concepts then.
You know you can always layer upon it as you run into something you you pull it and then you understand it you can understand it using your core concept knowledge right so this does not work without the core concepts now this let's talk about this just in time versus just in case so again you know you get the idea like for the.
Pull approach to work as and when you need something like maybe a function you've never used before it's okay to google that and youtube that and all that stuff to exactly you can pull to yourself as opposed to getting caught in that learning paradox where you're trying to learn everything just in case like oh i need.
To know everything just in case i need it well relax a little bit and you know know that you can pull the 80 percent to you when you needed piecemeal so let's recap before we talk about the step five the step one is that you want to focus on the 20 core concepts and again it works best if.
They get pushed to you through a structured program now step two is a missing step i'll talk about that in a second step three is to get real practice and that involves two elements which is working on a real data set and having a real client again could be internal external so that you can have.
That back and forth because that's what the truly the nature of bi is uh step four is the rest of the eighty percent knowledge don't go out and try to get all of it you can pull to yourself in just in time learning now hey i realized that this video is already kind of going long so what we're going to do is step two.
I'm going to do justice to it it is pretty awesome so we're going to cover that in the next video so stay tuned for that watch out for that but right now let's bring this video to finish and let's talk about step five and let's see if you can fill in the blanks power bi is dash bi now there was a time.
When companies would routinely spend millions of dollars sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years to implement bi using an antiquated old approach i mean the term used is like waterfall but yeah they would take spend a lot of money take a lot of time and to build this bi.
Which frankly didn't even work raise your hand leave a comment if you've gone through that experience or seen that in your company or another company so power bi we have to realize is a new breed of tool and with this comes a new approach power bi is agile bi and that means when you implement power bi.
You must implement it you should think about it in these quick cycles or sprints these bursts now if you think about it if that's the nature of power bi shouldn't we also learn power bi the same way so that is a step five which is that you must focus on learning power bi in these.
Agile learning cycles so step by step i'm going to give you just the highlights of this and again our whole program is structured around these key principles or key steps that i've talked about so there's a lot more there but to give you the highlights the first thing that i would say.
Is start small sometimes you can get into trouble if you bite off too big and people i talk to my new students and they're like oh i'm trying to do this and it's not working and like oh take a deep breath start small the next thing that i asked them to focus on is what i call quick wins see if there's something.
Quick that you can do as a oh wow which which really is to motivate you to keep you going and say yep i can do this and the next big thing that i talk about is that once you've done some practice had some quick wins is to look out for a shining beacon project now i'll tell you what the shining beacon project.
Uh you're gonna know when that happens is that when you show that project or show that power bi reporter dashboard to somebody they're gonna go well they're going to go whoa right they're going to say how do you do that or they can say well can you can you do that for us like if you're showing an example of somebody.
Else so that's the shiny beacon project and again i'm not going to go into too much detail into that what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to link you to the article which talks about this approach of starting in an agile manner rather than that and that has more details on the shining.
Beacon project so that's it folks those are our five steps now i know i didn't quite give you the step two and and as i mentioned step two is just something which i recently learned and i was kind of shocked myself that i've been teaching power bi for so long and i didn't even realize that i was.
Missing this step so we are going to cover that in the next video stay subscribed stay tuned and that'll be coming up next and if you're just getting started or kept getting uh keep getting stuck then a good place to start here is our number one ranked power bi tutorial we're gonna link to that in the corner and in the description.
And of course after that if you would like to we would love to welcome you inside a learn power bi family now uh click to watch our next video and don't forget to subscribe as that really helps support our channel and helps us put out great content until next time power on my friend.
