Here are 8 books that Power Pivot and Power BI fans have personally recommended if you like
Power Pivot and Power BI.
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I’ve been running the MrExcel website since 1998 and have written 66 books about Excel. I am an Excel generalist – I know a fair amount about almost every aspect of Excel. But I respect the specialists who become experts on one part of Excel and offer deep knowledge dives into those portions of Excel. Cleaning data with Power Query, calculating “impossible” calculations with DAX, and then presenting them on interactive dashboards are some of the deep dives that you will learn on this list.
If you just want to find out if Power Query is for you, this short book, written by the entertaining host of the Excel On Fire YouTube channel will show you what is possible using Power Query. Oz will show you the types of everyday problems that can be solved using the Get & Transform section of the Data tab in Excel. Once you get a taste of what is possible, you will be ready to dive in with Ken Puls’ book.
Author Oz Du Soleil's area of frustration with Excel is cleaning data. From his earliest days with Excel, he has found himself constantly needing to fix names that are ALLCAPS, peel addresses away from phone numbers, and fixing all the many other things that prevent data from being useful. In this intro to Power Query, Oz shows you five core techniques in Excel Power Query: Splitting data, Filling blanks, Joining data sets, grouping and summarizing, and adding columns using Column From Examples.
I’ve been running the MrExcel website since 1998 and have written 66 books about Excel. I am an Excel generalist – I know a fair amount about almost every aspect of Excel. But I respect the specialists who become experts on one part of Excel and offer deep knowledge dives into those portions of Excel. Cleaning data with Power Query, calculating “impossible” calculations with DAX, and then presenting them on interactive dashboards are some of the deep dives that you will learn on this list.
Kasper DeJonge works at Microsoft on the Power Query team. Before joining Microsoft, he was a data analyst, just like you. In this book, Kasper walks a data analyst through the steps of modelling your Excel data and getting it published on a Power BI dashboard. Along the way, his examples are designed to get you up to speed with the important aspects of Power BI.
Written by a member of Microsoft's Power BI team, this book provides a practical step by step guide on creating a financial dashboard using Power BI desktop and the PowerBI.com service. The book contains 6 chapters:
Introduction. Here I introduce the book, business intelligence and provide some history on Power BI
Understanding Dashboards and Report. Here we talk about what dashboards and reports are and how they are used in Power BI. Finally we talk about how to decide what to put on your reports and dashboards.
Collecting and preparing data. Here we install Power BI desktop, import data into…
I’ve been running the MrExcel website since 1998 and have written 66 books about Excel. I am an Excel generalist – I know a fair amount about almost every aspect of Excel. But I respect the specialists who become experts on one part of Excel and offer deep knowledge dives into those portions of Excel. Cleaning data with Power Query, calculating “impossible” calculations with DAX, and then presenting them on interactive dashboards are some of the deep dives that you will learn on this list.
Have you ever built a pivot table in Excel? They are great at summarizing data. But they are lousy at answering certain questions. When your manager asks for anything slightly complicated, the Pivot Table Calculated Field is destined to fail.
The Microsoft team who built the Power Pivot calculation engine realized that Calculated Fields were the weak point of pivot tables. They created an amazing new formula language that could let you answer the hard questions like how are we doing on same-store sales through the first two weekends of December?
The formula language – Data Analysis Expressions – or DAX is powerful but confusing. Matt Allington, another former data analyst has figured out how to use DAX to come up with all of those industry-standard calculations that he used to need as a manager at Coca-Cola.
He walks you up the DAX learning curve in this book.
Data analysis expressions (DAX) is the formula language of Power BI. Learning the DAX language is key to empower Power BI users so they can take advantage of these new Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities. This volume clearly explains the concepts of DAX while at the same time offering hands-on practice to engage the reader and help new knowledge stick. This third edition has been updated for the new Power BI Ribbon interface while still providing a bridge for readers wanting to learn DAX in the Power BI, Power Pivot, or Excel.
I’ve been running the MrExcel website since 1998 and have written 66 books about Excel. I am an Excel generalist – I know a fair amount about almost every aspect of Excel. But I respect the specialists who become experts on one part of Excel and offer deep knowledge dives into those portions of Excel. Cleaning data with Power Query, calculating “impossible” calculations with DAX, and then presenting them on interactive dashboards are some of the deep dives that you will learn on this list.
Microsoft quietly slipped the Get & Transform tools onto the Data tab in Excel in 2016. These tools are incredibly powerful – you clean your data once and Excel will remember how to clean your data every month, every week, every day, every hour. Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar will show you all of the best tricks for using these tools.
Power Query is the amazing new data cleansing tool in both Excel and Power BI Desktop. Do you find yourself performing the same data cleansing steps day after day? Power Query will make it faster to clean your data the first time. While Power Query is powerful, the interface is subtle—there are tools hiding in plain sight that are easy to miss. Go beyond the obvious and take Power Query to new levels with this book.
I’m obsessed with spreading the word about best practices when it comes to the accounts payable function. It’s a lot more complicated than you might imagine – if you want to avoid fraud, excess costs, duplicate payments, problems with the IRS, etc. I regularly speak at both online and live events. As the host of the AP Now YouTube channel, I’m able to share opinions, interview industry thought leaders, and share the latest business intelligence needed to run an efficient, cost-effective accounts payable and payment function. I’ve written over 20 business books, most of them focusing on various aspects of the accounts payable function.
It goes without saying that every accounting and finance professional should be skilled when it comes to Excel.
When looking for tips and tricks to take Excel skills to the next level, I turn to the man, a Microsoft MVP, who has written over 60 books on the topic, taught thousands of seminars on the issue and is known as MrExcel. This book shares information, the "aha" tips that uncover secret methods in Excel.
Inspiring Excel tips designed to save 100 hours per year.
Originally designed for Bill Jelen's live Power Excel seminars, the target audience already uses Excel 40 hours a week. These tips are the "aha" tips that uncover secret methods in Excel. The book covers general Excel functions, pivot tables, and formulas such as VLOOKUP and the new XLOOKUP. It introduces elements of modern Excel such as the Power Pivot Data Model and cleaning data with Power Query. Updated annually, this edition for 2022 adds information on collaboration features, LET and LAMBDA functions, amazing new data types, dynamic array formulas, and…
I’m obsessed with spreading the word about best practices when it comes to the accounts payable function. It’s a lot more complicated than you might imagine – if you want to avoid fraud, excess costs, duplicate payments, problems with the IRS, etc. I regularly speak at both online and live events. As the host of the AP Now YouTube channel, I’m able to share opinions, interview industry thought leaders, and share the latest business intelligence needed to run an efficient, cost-effective accounts payable and payment function. I’ve written over 20 business books, most of them focusing on various aspects of the accounts payable function.
Because I believe it is critical for all accounting and finance professionals to be as proficient as possible with Excel, I’ve included a second Excel book on this list.
This about-to-be-published book represents the latest iteration of MrExcel LX - The Holy Grail of Excel Tips published in 2019. Without a doubt, like his many other books, it will provide tips and tricks to help the audience perfect their much-needed Excel skills.
Excel tips to skyrocket white-collar productivity.
Originally designed for Bill Jelen's live Power Excel seminars, the target audience already uses Excel 40 hours a week. These tips are the "aha" tips that uncover secret methods in Excel. The book covers general Excel functions, pivot tables, and formulas such as VLOOKUP and the new XLOOKUP. It introduces elements of modern Excel such as the Power Pivot Data Model and cleaning data with Power Query. Updated annually, this edition for 2021 adds information on LET and LAMBDA functions, amazing new data types, dynamic array formulas, and more.
I’m an applied statistician and academic researcher/lecturer at New Zealand’s oldest university – the University of Otago. R facilitates everything I do – research, academic publication, and teaching. It’s the latter part of my job that motivated my own book on R. From first-year statistics students who have never seen R to my own Ph.D. students using R to implement novel and highly complex statistical methods and models, my experience is that all ultimately love the ease with which the R language permits exploration, visualisation, analysis, and inference of one’s data. The ever-growing need in today’s society for skilled statisticians and data scientists means there's never been a better time to learn this essential language.
A gentle yet detailed book for beginner programmers. A great book for those who know they'll be getting up to some programming in R but who are very new to programming in general. The book's chapters are filled with content on the syntax, usage, and 'best practice' guidelines. The examples guide the reader in a step-by-step fashion to maximise understanding. An especially unique chapter providing examples on things you can do in R that you might've otherwise done in Excel is one of its stand-out features.
Mastering R has never been easier Picking up R can be tough, even for seasoned statisticians and data analysts. R For Dummies, 2nd Edition provides a quick and painless way to master all the R you'll ever need. Requiring no prior programming experience and packed with tons of practical examples, step-by-step exercises, and sample code, this friendly and accessible guide shows you how to know your way around lists, data frames, and other R data structures, while learning to interact with other programs, such as Microsoft Excel. You'll learn how to reshape and manipulate data, merge data sets, split and…
I started my career as a research scientist building machine learning algorithms for weather forecasting. Twenty years later, I found myself at a precision agriculture startup creating models that provided guidance to farmers on when to plant, what to plant, etc. So, I am part of the movement from academia to industry. Now, at Google Cloud, my team builds cross-industry solutions and I see firsthand what our customers need in their data science teams. This set of books is what I suggest when a CTO asks how to upskill their workforce, or when a graduate student asks me how to break into the industry.
In industry, your data is very likely to live within a data warehouse such as BigQuery, Redshift, or Snowflake. Therefore, to be an effective data scientist in the industry, you should learn how to use data warehouses effectively.
Once you learn data warehousing and SQL with any one of these products, it is quite easy to pick up another. So which one do you start with?
You can use Snowflake on all three of the major public clouds. Because it’s a standalone product, it is the most similar to a “traditional” data warehouse and can be picked up easily even if you are not familiar with cloud computing. That makes it a good data warehouse to start with, and is the reason my second book pick is this book on Snowflake.
BigQuery is also available on all three major public clouds, but it works best (and is used most commonly)…
Explore the modern market of data analytics platforms and the benefits of using Snowflake computing, the data warehouse built for the cloud.
With the rise of cloud technologies, organizations prefer to deploy their analytics using cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Cloud vendors are offering modern data platforms for building cloud analytics solutions to collect data and consolidate into single storage solutions that provide insights for business users. The core of any analytics framework is the data warehouse, and previously customers did not have many choices of platform to use.
