According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Microsoft Power BI is one of today’s top business intelligence tools, chiefly because most IT firms rely on Power BI for their business analytics. As a result, the current IT industry finds a massive demand for Power BI Experts.
This tutorial is solely dedicated to helping aspiring Power BI professionals grasp the essential fundamentals of Power BI Interview questions and answers and crack the interviews in real-time.
Table of Contents
Power BI Interview Questions For Freshers
1. What is Power BI?
Power BI is a business analytics tool developed by Microsoft that helps you turn multiple unrelated data sources into valuable and interactive insights. These data may be in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or cloud-based/on-premises hybrid data warehouses. You can easily connect to all your data sources and share the insights with anyone.
2. Why should we use Power BI?
Because Power BI provides an easy way for anyone, including non-technical people, to connect, change, and visualize their raw business data from many different sources and turn it into valuable data that makes it easy to make smart business decisions.
3. What is Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is an open-source application designed and developed by Microsoft. Power BI Desktop will allow users to connect to, transform, and visualize your data with ease. Power BI Desktop lets users build visuals and collections of visuals that can be shared as reports with their colleagues or clients in your organization.
4. What is Power Pivot?
Power Pivot is an add-on provided by Microsoft for Excel since 2010. Power Pivot was designed to extend the analytical capabilities and services of Microsoft Excel.
5. What is Power Query?
Power Query is a business intelligence tool designed by Microsoft for Excel. Power Query allows you to import data from various data sources and will enable you to clean, transform and reshape your data as per the requirements. Power Query allows you to write your query once and then run it with a simple refresh.
6. What is self-service BI, anyway?
SSBI is an abbreviation for Self-Service Business Intelligence and is a breakthrough in business intelligence. SSBI has enabled many business professionals with no technical or coding background to use Power BI and generate reports and draw predictions successfully. Even non-technical users can create these dashboards to help their businesses make more informed decisions.
7. What is DAX?
DAX stands for Data Analysis Expressions. It’s a collection of functions, operators, and constants used in formulas to calculate and return values. In other words, it helps you create new info from data you already have.
8. What are Filters in Power BI?
The term “Filter” is self-explanatory. Filters are mathematical and logical conditions applied to data to filter out essential information in rows and columns. The following are the variety of filters available in Power BI:
- Manual filters
- Auto filters
- Include/Exclude filters
- Drill-down filters
- Cross Drill filters
- Drillthrough filters
- Drillthrough filters
- URL filters–transient
- Pass-Through filters
9. List out some drawbacks/limitations of using Power BI.
Here are some limitations to using Power BI:
- Power BI does not accept file sizes larger than 1 GB and doesn’t mix imported data accessed from real-time connections.
- There are very few data sources that allow real-time connections to Power BI reports and dashboards.
- It only shares dashboards and reports with users logged in with the same email address.
- Dashboard doesn’t accept or pass user, account, or other entity parameters.
10. Name the different connectivity modes available in Power BI?
There are three main connectivity modes used in Power BI.
SQL Server Import
An SQL Server Import is the default and most common connectivity type used in Power BI. It allows you to use the full capabilities of the Power BI Desktop.
Direct Query
The Direct Query connection type is only available when you connect to specific data sources. In this connectivity type, Power BI will only store the metadata of the underlying data and not the actual data.
Live Connection
This connectivity type, it does not store data in the Power BI model. All interaction with a report using a Live Connection will directly query the existing Analysis Services model. There are only 3 data sources that support the live connection method – SQL Server Analysis Services (Tabular models and Multidimensional Cubes), Azure Analysis Services (Tabular Models), and Power BI Datasets hosted in the Power BI Service.
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11. What are the various types of refresh options provided in Power BI?
Four important types of refresh options provided in Microsoft Power BI are as follows:
- Package refresh – This synchronizes your Power BI Desktop or Excel file between the Power BI service and OneDrive, or SharePoint Online.
- Model or data refresh – This refreshes the dataset within the Power BI service with data from the original data source.
- Tile refresh – This updates the cache for tile visuals every 15 minutes on the dashboard once data changes.
- Visual container refresh – This refreshes the visible container and updates the cached report visuals within a report once the data changes.
Power BI Interview Questions For Intermediate Level
12. Where is data stored in Power BI?
Most of the time, power BI gets assisted by the cloud to store the data. Power BI can use a desktop service. Microsoft Azure is used as the primary cloud service to store data.
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Blob Storage
13. What is row-level security?
Row-level security limits the data a user can view and has access to, and it relies on filters. Users can define the rules and roles in Power BI Desktop and also publish them to Power BI Service to configure row-level security.
14. Why should you apply general formatting to Power BI data?
Users can use general formatting to make it easier for Power BI to categorize and identify data, making it considerably easier to work with.
15. What are the different views available in Power BI Desktop?
There are three different views in Power BI, each of which serves another purpose:
Report View – In this view, users can add visualizations and additional report pages and publish the same on the portal.
Data View – In this view, data shaping can be performed using Query Editor tools.
Model View – In this view, users can manage relationships between complex datasets.
16. Explain the building blocks of Microsoft Power BI.
The important building blocks of Power BI are as follows:
Visualizations
Visualization is the process of generating charts and graphs for the representation of insights into business data.
Datasets
A dataset is the collection of data used to create a visualization, such as a column of sales figures. The dataset can get combined and filtered from a variety of sources via built-in data plugins.
Reports
The final stage is the report stage. Here, there is a group of visualizations on one or more pages. For example, charts and maps are combined to make a final report.
Dashboards
A Power BI dashboard helps you to share a single visualization with colleagues and clients to view your final dashboard.
Tiles
A tile is an individual visualization on your final dashboard or one of your charts in your final report.
17. What are the critical components of the Power BI toolkit?
The critical components of Power BI are mentioned below.
- Power Query
- Power Pivot
- Power View
- Power Map
- Power Q&A
18. What do you mean by the content pack?
A content pack is defined as a ready-made collection of visualizations and Power BI reports using your chosen service. You’d use a content pack when you want to get up and running quickly instead of creating a report from scratch.
19. Define bi-directional cross-filtering.
Bidirectional cross-filtering lets data modelers decide how they want their Power BI Desktop filters to flow for data, using the relationships between tables. The filter context is transmitted to a second related table that exists on the other side of any given table relationship. This procedure helps data modelers solve the many-to-many issue without having to complicate DAX formulas. So, to sum it up, bidirectional cross-filtering makes the job for data modelers easier.
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20. What are the three fundamental concepts of DAX?
Syntax
This is how the formula is written—that is, the elements that comprise it. The Syntax includes functions such as SUM (used when you want to add figures). If the Syntax isn’t correct, you’ll get an error message.
Functions
These are formulas that use specific values (also known as arguments) in a particular order to perform a calculation, similar to the functions in Excel. The categories of functions are date/time, time intelligence, information, logical, mathematical, statistical, text, parent/child, and others.
Context
There are two types: row context and filter context. Row context comes into play whenever a formula has a function that applies filters to identify a single row in a table. When one or more filters are applied in a calculation that determines a result or value, the filter context comes into play.
21. Name some commonly used tasks in the Query Editor.
- Connect to data
- Shape and combine data
- Group rows
- Pivot columns
- Create custom columns
- Query formulas
22. What do you mean by grouping?
Power BI Desktop helps you to group the data in your visuals into chunks. You can, however, define your groups and bins. For grouping, use Ctrl + click to select multiple elements in the visual. Right-click one of those elements and, from the menu that appears, choose Group. In the Groups window, you can create new groups or modify existing ones.
23. Explain responsive slicers in Power BI.
On a Power BI final report page, a developer can resize a responsive slicer to various sizes and shapes, and the data collected in the container will be rearranged to find a match. If a visual report becomes too small to be useful, an icon representing the visual takes its place, saving space on the report page.
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24. What is query folding in Power BI?
Query folding is used when steps defined in the Query Editor are translated into SQL and executed by the source database instead of your device. It helps with scalability and efficient processing.
25. What is “M language.”
M is a programming language used in Power Query as a functional, case-sensitive language similar to other programming languages and easy to use.
Power BI Interview Questions For Experienced
26. What are the major differences between visual-level, page-level, and report-level filters in Power BI?
Visual-level filters are used to filter data within a single visualization. Page-level filters are used to work on an entire page in a report, and different pages can have various filters.
Report-level filters are used to filter all the visualizations and pages in the report.
27. List the most common techniques for data shaping.
- Adding indexes
- Applying for a sort order
- Removing columns and rows
28. How is the Schedule Refresh feature designed to work?
Users can set up an automatic refresh of data based on daily or weekly requirements. Users can schedule only one refresh maximum daily unless they have Power BI Pro. The Schedule Refresh section uses the pull-down menu choices to select a frequency, time zone, and time of day.
29. What information is needed to create a map in Power Map?
Power Map can display geographical visualizations. Therefore, some location data is needed—for example, city, state, country, or latitude and longitude.
30. Which in-memory analytics engine does Power Pivot use?
Power Pivot uses the xVelocity engine. xVelocity can handle huge amounts of data, storing data in columnar databases. All data gets loaded into RAM memory when you use in-memory analytics, which boosts the processing speed.
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31. How can you depict a story in Power BI?
Every individual chart or visualization report generated is collected and represented on a single screen. Such an approach is called a Power BI Dashboard. A Dashboard in Power BI is used to depict a story.
32. What are KPIs in Power BI?
KPI is abbreviated as Key Performance Indicator. Any professional organization has teams and employees who follow the KPI protocols. The organizations set up KPIs for all employees. These KPIs act as their targets. These KPIs are compared to previous performance and analyze the progress.
33. What is a Slicer?
Slicers are an integral part of a business report generated using Power BI. The functionality of a slicer can be considered similar to that of a filter, but, unlike a filter, a Slicer can display a visual representation of all values and users will be provided with the option to select from the available values in the slicer’s drop-down menu.
34. Explain Power BI Designer.
It is a combined solution offered to upload the reports and dashboards to the PowerBI.com website for reference. It consists of Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power Table.
35. How do you reshape data in Power BI?
Power BI offers a wide variety of data source connectivity options. Data Editor is one of the tools used to manipulate rows and columns of data and helps you reshape it according to the requirements.
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