The Foundations of Power BI Analytics

Zoe Allen · October 7, 2024

Next Live Workshop Dates

Workshop: Design Your Stakeholder Semantic Model

Power BI isn’t there to “make data look pretty” but rather to deliver specific insights and answer specific business questions from the intended user base. So the starting point for analytics is to identify the audience, their questions, associated logic and “slice and dice” attributes that are required to deliver those insights. This is a non-technical exercise focused around gathering requirements and conceptually designing a semantic model that will form the foundation of your reporting and modeling solutions.

You will come away from this module with an approach and templates (which you can immediately use for your own use cases!) to capture stakeholder requirements for report and translate these into a data structure (semantic model) required for Power BI.

📅 Friday, 10 January 2025

Workshop: Build Dynamic Models in Power Query

Our data model design from the previous session has provided a blueprint for how we need to shape our data into the right structure. This is done through a sequence of activities known as j/ Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) – bringing data into Power BI from data source(s), cleaning and shaping that data as required, and loading it into a Power BI data model. In this course our data source is Excel/CSV files with some specific data cleaning activities (e.g. header rows in each of our actuals files, dates potentially in a different format to our machine locale) and transformation activities (e.g. calculating amounts in Reporting currency given local currency amounts/a separate table of exchange rates).

After this you will know how to ingest data from a Teams Channel (SharePoint) in Power Query and create a sequence of queries to shape and clean data (without writing any code!) and embed logic for currency conversion.

📅 Friday, 17 January 2025

Workshop: Create Time-aware Financial Metrics using DAX

Now that we have our data loaded into Power BI, we need to create the table relationships and a set of base measures for Actuals/Budget and key metrics such as Revenue, Gross Profit and Net Margin. We will also leverage time intelligence to show MTD, QTD or YTD values depending on a slicer selection.

After this course you will know how to write measures in DAX, including understand the power of time intelligence to create dynamic calculations

📅 Friday, 24 January 2025

Workshop: Variance Analysis with Power BI Visualisation

Data visualisation is all about drawing the attention of your audience to what is important – providing the right context to the numbers so that they can quickly evaluate performance and what is driving it. Variance analysis – e.g. highlighting and explaining variances from actuals to budget or Prior year – is the cornerstone of understanding financial performance and becomes very powerful in Power BI through visualisations that enable “slice and dice” capability.

By the end of this module, you will build a basic Power BI report page that is formatted with corporate colours/a logo and which allows a report consumer to see variances to budget and Prior year through tables/matrix, line charts, bar graphs and a waterfall chart, utilising the cross-filtering capabilities of Power BI to understand what is driving them.

📅 Friday, 31 January 2025


Course Overview

What we Cover:

Designing and building data models that align with stakeholder requirements

The challenges:

Importing and transforming data from multiple sources into the right structure for analysis in Power BI

The Barriers:

  • Leveraging DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) to create financial metrics such as revenue, profit, and margin, as well as time-based calculations like YTD and MTD.
  • Using Power BI’s visual and interactive capabilities to analyze and present variances between actuals, budgets, and prior year figures, helping stakeholders understand key financial drivers.

Learning Outcomes:

Using a realistic accounting dataset, this course empowers you to automate your month-end reports using the built-in data transformation, logic and visualisation capabilities of Power BI.

You will be able to generate powerful insights on financial performance all without the manual effort of continually producing different cuts of data/pieces of analysis.

Upon completion, participants will confidently create engaging reports, turn data into actionable insights, and build strong cross-functional relationships, driving better decision-making.

Business Benefits:

Significant time savings by automating month-end reporting and enabling users to self-serve on financial data, reducing reliance on finance analysts to manually produce reports and analysis each month. This leads to more efficient processes and faster decision-making.


Nikesh Valji,
Founder LAX Financial Consulting


Course Facilitator

Rishi Sapra

Course Facilitator

As part of Avanade’s Global Data & AI Integrated Centre of Excellence (ICOE), Rishi Sapra manages strategic projects focused on Microsoft Fabric, Modern Finance, and Azure/BI migration.



Prerequisites: No Prerequisite knowledge is required to be successful in this course

Advanced Preparation: No advanced preparation is required

Program Level: Basic

Delivery Method: Group Internet


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About Instructor

Zoe Allen

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