Which Power BI Course Should I Take?

Four Power BI classes, and the names do not make it obvious where to start. This is what each one is for, and the order that works.

Most people start in the wrong place

Power BI looks like an Excel feature and is not one. It has its own data model, its own formula language, and its own ideas about how tables relate to each other. People who arrive expecting a better PivotTable spend the first day surprised.

The useful question is where you are coming from. Someone who lives in spreadsheets and wants better charts needs a different starting point from someone who has been handed a reporting job and a deadline.

The two starting points

Power BI for Excel Users is two days and starts where you already are. It maps what you know onto what Power BI does, gets you connecting to data and building visuals, and stops before the modelling gets deep. Take this if you are curious rather than committed, or if reporting is a part of your job rather than the whole of it.

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst is the full PL-300 curriculum and the certification path. Take this if you are going to own reporting for a team, or if you need the certification on paper.

Why ours runs four days

The published PL-300 is a three-day course. We teach it over four.

Not because there is extra material, but because three days is not enough to absorb what is in it. The standard schedule moves through data modelling, DAX and visualisation fast enough that people follow along in class and cannot reproduce it at their desk a week later. The fourth day is room: time to work through it properly, and time for the questions that only come up once you have tried something and it has not worked.

You will find the three-day version cheaper elsewhere, including on this site from a partner. If your budget is fixed and your team is already comfortable with data modelling, that is a reasonable choice. If this is their first serious exposure, the extra day is the difference between having attended a course and being able to do the work.

What comes after

Introduction to DAX is where most people hit the wall, and it belongs after PL-300 rather than before. DAX makes very little sense in the abstract. It starts to make sense once you have built a model, written a measure that returned something wrong, and cannot work out why. Come to this class with that experience and two days will change how you work. Come to it first and it is two days of syntax.

Power Query is the other half of the job and the one people underestimate. Most reporting problems are not visualisation problems, they are data problems: the source is messy, it arrives in three files, the dates are text. Power Query is where that gets fixed, and it works the same way in Excel as in Power BI, so the skill pays off twice.

The order that works

1. Power BI for Excel Users if you are coming from spreadsheets and want to see whether this is for you
2. PL-300 when you are committed, or when reporting has become your job
3. Power Query once you are tired of cleaning data by hand
4. DAX when your measures are returning numbers you cannot explain

Steps three and four are interchangeable, and plenty of people only need one of them. Nobody needs all four in a row.

Training a team

Past four or five people a private cohort usually costs less per seat, and it lets the instructor use your data rather than the sample dataset. That matters more with Power BI than with most subjects: the hard part is modelling your own messy tables, and a class spent on clean sample data leaves that part untouched.

If you are not sure which class your team needs, describe what they are trying to build. Getting this wrong costs more here than in most subjects, because someone sent to DAX too early usually concludes they are bad at it.