I’ve found the following resources helpful to me and hopefully you’ll find them useful too!
Books
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Power Pivot and Power Bi: The Excel User’s Guide to Dax, Power Query, Power Bi & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016 (buy here) By Rob Collie and Avichal Singh Rob and Avi do a great job laying out what the future of the “Excel Pro” is going to look like. It’s hard not to agree with them. |
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M Is for (Data) Monkey: A Guide to the M Language in Excel Power Query By Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar Rob and Avi are quite light on the Power Query/ETL portion, and this is where Ken and Miguel come in to fill the gaps. I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to improve their queries and apply best practices when it comes to connecting to data. |
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The definitive guide to DAX: Business Intelligence with Microsoft Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Power BI By Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari While Rob and Avi provide high-energy, Marco and Alberto (aka “the Italians”) are here to take your understanding to the next level. The sky is the limit after you finish studying this book. |
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Introducing Microsoft Power BI By Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo (ePub, Mobi, Stanard PDF, Mobile PDF) A free e-book (links above) published from Microsoft, also written by the Italians. It’s very basic but serves as a nice introduction. You can’t beat free. |
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Excel VBA Programming for Dummies, 4th Edition By John Walkenbach Times are a-changin’, with VBA slowly loosing prominence due to the faster and more effective workflows of Power Query and Power Pivot, however, VBA is so deeply embedded in many organizations that it’s still worth your time understanding how it works – and sometimes you just can’t beat its raw flexibility and power. |
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Database Modeling and Design By Toby Teorey, Sam Lightstone, Tom Nadeau, and H.V. Jagadish The authors provide a solid framework for database modelling and allow you to gain a better understanding of the theory behind databases you may be working with. |
Blogs
- PowerPivotPro (feed) – Rob Collie (and crew’s) blog
- Sqlbi (feed) – The blog of “the Italians”
- Microsoft Official Power BI Blog (feed) – Official updates and software announcements
- Microsoft Official Excel Blog (feed) – New features and the occasional fluff article
- Microsoft Official PowerApps Blog (feed) – New features regarding PowerApps
- Microsoft Official Flow Blog (feed) – New features regarding Microsoft Flow
- Chris Webb’s BI Blog (feed) – Chris regularly demystifies new features and puts theory to practice
- The Ken Puls Blog (feed) – Ken Puls (author of M is for Data Monkey)
Communities
- https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI
- https://www.reddit.com/r/BusinessIntelligence
- http://community.powerbi.com/ – The official Power BI Community
Software/Downloads
Note: All of this software is free.
- Power BI – Desktop app, mobile apps, and data gateways
- Power Query – (Excel 2010/2013 only, included by default in Excel 2016)
- Power Pivot – (Excel 2010 only, included as available add-in in Pro versions of Excel 2013/2016)
- PowerApps – Desktop studio app.
- SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition – includes the database engine, management studio, analysis services, integration services, and reporting services. Free for development and testing!
- Visual Studio Community – a fully featured integrated development environment for managing tabular models (as well as a whole host of other software projects!)
- SQL Server Data Tools – an add-in for Visual Studio that will enable you to manage your tabular models