Why is it that while some of us spend so much
time trying to learn Power BI through books, through blogs,
through videos, maybe even through training programs but we
still get stuck when it comes to crossing this
learning to doing gap. We still get stuck when it comes time to apply
everything that we have learned into a workplace, into our business setting.
Now is it possible that we're missing a key
step. Now if that's you or if that's a future you would like to
avoid make sure to watch this video till the end.
Now I have trained thousands of students all over the world
through my Power BI training programs and these are the best lessons
that I have learned that you need to master
Power BI. My name is Avi Singh. I'm a Microsoft MVP and a best selling Power
Bi author and if you want to become a Power BI pro
make sure to subscribe and click that bell so you are notified
whenever we go live to answer your Power BI questions. So
again as I said these are the lessons that we have uh
used inside our learn Power BI family and
the single goal of that program and for the steps I'm going to describe in this
video are to get you from learning to doing so
let's get started. With step number one now when it comes
to power bi a lot of people try learning power bi
through what i call the jigsaw puzzle of google and youtube
now here's the thing that this approach can and does work in some other settings
now i come from an excel background and excel is a
great example where of you can easily learn it through the jigsaw
puzzle of google and youtube and excel uh you can just look over
somebody's shoulders see what they're doing
and that's one more trick up your sleeve power bi
unfortunately doesn't quite work that way
and the way power bi is structured is that it has
20 percent of these core concepts that you
must master right so that's uh and the good part is that if you do
master these 20 core concepts these are the ones which
give you the 80 of the results the classic 80 20 rule
now here's the other thing about these core concepts so again if you
tried learning through google and youtube you realize that it's nearly
impossible to master these concepts to piece it
together it's very frustrating and can take a long time so the rule one
here is that you do want these core concepts
this core knowledge to be pushed to you what does
that mean it means that it's best if it comes through a structured
program now again i'm not saying join my program
although our program is built around uh you know
really this focus on these core concepts but find
any teacher any any structured program out there
uh could be video based could be a book uh which works for you and which gives
you that 20 core concept so again instead of trying to piece it together
you know you have it pushed to you so that's the step one now step
two is actually the missing step which i
only recently discovered and we're going to talk about it later
so let's go to step three get real now what am i
talking about here now what i'll say is if you
really want to learn power bi you have to apply it if you want to go from
learning to do learning to doing you gotta apply what
you're learning and for that you need two things make
sure you have both ingredients the first is real data now of course
inside my class i teach using sample data right there is adventurers there's
contoso and all of that but guess what real data is always messy
data and that's what i love about real data
so you need that exposure you need that experience
but this is where a lot of people go wrong they miss
the second key ingredient in this which is
you need a real client now when i say client it doesn't have to be
it could be internal or external so you could be working as an employee or a
consultant or of course a freelancer or intern or
anything like that but you have to be working with a real client
now working without a real client so imagine you there's a lot of real data
out there you can just go out to websites and just download real data
sets but that is like trying to learn tennis
when all you're doing is hitting the ball
against the wall you're going to get really good at
hitting the ball against the wall but you're not
really learning tennis if you want to learn tennis
you have to play with a partner you have to have that
back and forth and that's what's most crucial
about this getting this real practice so make sure you have real data
and make sure you're working with a real client because
power bi as i often talk about is like peeling an onion and you want that
experience to peel that onion go layer by layer
with your bi we're gonna talk more about that in step
five as well so let's talk about step four now hey uh
we talked about this 80 20 rule which definitely does apply the twenty percent
core concepts give you the eighty percent of the
results but then of course the next question is
what about the rest of the eighty percent of the knowledge do i not need
it should i not care about it well of course you need it you should
care about it but this is again where a lot of people go wrong
which is they go on this endless quest to acquire that 80 percent of knowledge
now you realize that power bi is knowledge or knowledge in
any domain is near limitless so their experience
becomes this frustrating experience of climbing
one sand dune after the next and in fact they get caught in what i call the
learning paradox which is the more they learn the less they feel they know
and i have been trapped in this and if you have felt this thing
let me know so i've had people who've been in learning mode for years because
they feel that they're not done the more they learn they're like oh my god i
don't know this i don't know that now that can be extremely frustrating
and not just that it takes you away from your real purpose
of serving others using your power bi knowledge
so how do you get out of this paradox how do you get out of this trap now
there are a few different ways but i'm going to give you one which is
to realize that the 80 percent of the learning it's
best to pull that to you when you need it so
again this contrasts that with the 20 core concepts which should
be pushed to you somebody should just give it to you but imagine if there
was a uh you know kind of a reference manual with
all the remaining eighty percent of power bi knowledge
oh god it'll be a pretty fat book but people are often trying to read that
book they're trying to go out there and get this information there
well it's best to pull it when you need it
and so i'm going to talk about just in time versus
just in case learning but one connection that i want to make for you
is that this only works if you have mastered the 20
core concepts if you have mastered the 20 person core concepts then
you know you can always layer upon it as you run into something
you you pull it and then you understand it you can understand it using your core
concept knowledge right so this does not work without the
core concepts now this let's talk about this just in time
versus just in case so again you know you get the idea like for the
pull approach to work as and when you need something like
maybe a function you've never used before it's okay to google that and
youtube that and all that stuff to exactly you can pull to yourself
as opposed to getting caught in that learning paradox where you're trying to
learn everything just in case like oh i need
to know everything just in case i need it
well relax a little bit and you know know that you can pull the 80 percent
to you when you needed piecemeal so let's
recap before we talk about the step five the step
one is that you want to focus on the 20 core concepts and again it works best if
they get pushed to you through a structured
program now step two is a missing step i'll talk
about that in a second step three is to get real practice and
that involves two elements which is working on a real data set and
having a real client again could be internal external so that you can have
that back and forth because that's what the truly the nature
of bi is uh step four is the rest of the eighty
percent knowledge don't go out and try to get all of it
you can pull to yourself in just in time learning now hey i realized that this
video is already kind of going long so what we're going to do is step two
i'm going to do justice to it it is pretty awesome so we're going to cover
that in the next video so stay tuned for that
watch out for that but right now let's bring this video to
finish and let's talk about step five and let's see if you can fill in the
blanks power bi is dash bi now there was a time
when companies would routinely spend millions of dollars sometimes
hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years
to implement bi using an antiquated old approach
i mean the term used is like waterfall but yeah they would take spend a lot of
money take a lot of time and to build this bi
which frankly didn't even work raise your hand leave a comment if
you've gone through that experience or seen that in your company
or another company so power bi we have to realize is a new
breed of tool and with this comes a new approach
power bi is agile bi and that means when you implement power bi
you must implement it you should think about it in these quick
cycles or sprints these bursts now if you think about it if that's the nature
of power bi shouldn't we also learn power bi the
same way so that is a step five which is that you
must focus on learning power bi in these
agile learning cycles so step by step i'm going to give
you just the highlights of this and again
our whole program is structured around these key principles or key steps
that i've talked about so there's a lot more there but to give you the
highlights the first thing that i would say
is start small sometimes you can get into trouble
if you bite off too big and people i talk to my new students and they're like
oh i'm trying to do this and it's not working and like oh
take a deep breath start small the next thing that i asked them to focus on is
what i call quick wins see if there's something
quick that you can do as a oh wow which which really is to motivate you to keep
you going and say yep i can do this and the next
big thing that i talk about is that once you've done some practice
had some quick wins is to look out for a shining
beacon project now i'll tell you what the shining beacon project
uh you're gonna know when that happens is that when you show that project or
show that power bi reporter dashboard to somebody
they're gonna go well they're going to go whoa right
they're going to say how do you do that or they can say well
can you can you do that for us like if you're showing an example of somebody
else so that's the shiny beacon project and
again i'm not going to go into too much detail into that what i'm going
to do instead is i'm going to link you to the article
which talks about this approach of starting in an agile manner
rather than that and that has more details on the shining
beacon project so that's it folks those are our five steps now i know i
didn't quite give you the step two and and as i
mentioned step two is just something which i
recently learned and i was kind of shocked myself that i've been teaching
power bi for so long and i didn't even realize that i was
missing this step so we are going to cover that in the
next video stay subscribed stay tuned and that'll be coming up next
and if you're just getting started or kept getting uh keep getting stuck
then a good place to start here is our number one ranked power bi tutorial
we're gonna link to that in the corner and in the description
and of course after that if you would like to we would love to welcome you
inside a learn power bi family now uh click to watch our next video and don't
forget to subscribe as that really helps support our channel
and helps us put out great content until next time power on
my friend
you