Hi Dev Community! 👋
I am software engineer and exploring tools for data analysis and visualization, and Power BI has caught my attention. Before diving in, I want to understand the learning curve of Power BI.
So, I’m asking:
Is Power BI easy to learn for beginners?
How long does it take to get comfortable with building reports and dashboards?
Are there any specific skills, resources, or tutorials that helped you when you started?
For those who’ve already mastered Power BI, what was the hardest part, and how did you overcome it? Did you find it beginner-friendly, or does it require prior experience with tools like Excel or SQL?
Top comments (2)
I'm a sysadmin and DBA, I've found PBI incredibly easy to learn. If you have experince of products like Access or Powerpoint, you can generally work out most of what you need to get something up and running within 10-15 minutes.
I found a 30 mins beginners guide via on LinkedIn Learning, that was enough for me to get going with the basics. I built a dashboard that allowed my team to quickly look up DB backups by drawing the raw backup data from the backup summary tables we keep. Linkage between the components is automatic, so if you have raw data then sticking selection dialogs, graphs and tables, they all automatically link so changing data selections in one control affects the rest.
Most of our biz users are very comfortable with PBI at my shop, they find it very fast way to throw data presentations together for clients, they build custom displays sometimes on the fly in front of clients when needed.
To be honest as someone with zero design skills the hardest part for me was learning how to position the controls to actually make them look good and feel intuitive, the actual assembly of the data was pretty easy.
Yes and No.
If you have good, well structured data then creating visualisations is relatively trivial. The key features of PBI are (for me) also it's biggest weaknesses. If you have crappy data, or data spread across sources then the ingestion pipeline is clever and powerful but hides away the ugly truth that people should care more about the data quality at the source.
PBI tooling is basically an interface on top of 3d.js; it is on a 3 week update cadence so any course, blog or YouTube video more than 3 months old is completely out of date because the interface has moved on; and you end up spending more time fettling existing reports than creating new ones because the functionality and performance you craved 6 months ago is now available.