Book Image

Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel

By : Bernard Obeng Boateng
5 (1)
Book Image

Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel

5 (1)
By: Bernard Obeng Boateng

Overview of this book

Microsoft Excel's BI solutions have evolved, offering users more flexibility and control over analyzing data directly in Excel. Features like PivotTables, Data Model, Power Query, and Power Pivot empower Excel users to efficiently get, transform, model, aggregate, and visualize data. Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel offers a practical way to demystify the use and application of these tools using real-world examples and simple illustrations. This book will introduce you to the world of data modeling in Excel, as well as definitions and best practices in data structuring for both normalized and denormalized data. The next set of chapters will take you through the useful features of Data Model and Power Pivot, helping you get to grips with the types of schemas (snowflake and star) and create relationships within multiple tables. You’ll also understand how to create powerful and flexible measures using DAX and Cube functions. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to apply the acquired knowledge in real-world scenarios and build an interactive dashboard that will help you make important decisions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Overview and Introduction to Data Modeling in Microsoft Excel
6
Part 2: Creating Insightful Calculations from your Data Model using DAX and Cube Functions
9
Part 3: Putting it all together with a Dashboard

Creating DAX Calculations from Your Data Model – Introduction to Measures and Calculated Columns

We are halfway through our journey to creating a dynamic sales dashboard that will give users insights into our sales business. After extracting, transforming, loading, and modeling our data, we now have to measure our sales performance. To do this, we need to calculate some key metrics. These metrics will help us create visualizations using some of the various dimensions in our data model.

In this chapter, you will learn the key differences between measures and calculated columns, understand the various ways to create a Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) measure in Excel, master some key DAX functions and concepts, and apply these to our final sales dashboard.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • DAX as a calculated column or measure
  • Creating your first measure—where to go
  • Common DAX functions (time intelligence, FILTER, CALCULATE, and...