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.
Rob Collie was a pioneer at Microsoft. After leaving the Excel team, he helped architect the tools that would become Power Pivot and Power BI. He left Microsoft and started his own consultancy, helping big companies answer important questions in just a few hours with Power Pivot.
His books are the best-selling books in the category.
While Matt Allington will get you up to speed, Rob will explain every nuance of Power Pivot, DAX, and Power BI.
Microsoft PowerPivot is a free add-on to Excel from Microsoft that allows users to produce new kinds of reports and analyses that were simply impossible before, and this book is the first to tackle DAX formulas, the core capability of PowerPivot, from the perspective of the Excel audience. Written by the world's foremost PowerPivot blogger and practitioner, the book's concepts and approach are introduced in a step-by-step manner tailored to the learning style of Excel users everywhere. The techniques presented allow users to produce, in hours or even minutes, results that formerly would have taken entire teams weeks or months…
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.
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.
