Looking to ace a data analytics interview for a role that uses Power BI?
This guide will walk you through some of the common questions that you might be asked about essential Power BI features, including core components, and use cases - as well as the answers to those questions!
It covers everything from comparing Power BI with Tableau, to exploring its customization options and functionalities, and more. This guide covers everything you need to know to excel (no pun intended) in your interview.
Better still, I’ve broken this down into 36 questions over 3 sections: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced, so you can see how you compare and how many you can answer correctly.
So grab a coffee and a notepad, and let's dive in!
Sidenote: If you find that you’re struggling with the questions in this guide, or perhaps feel that you could use some more training and want to build some more impressive projects for your portfolio, then check out my complete Power BI bootcamp course.
This Power BI Bootcamp will take you from absolute beginner in Power BI to being able to get hired in 2024 as a confident and effective Business Intelligence Analyst. You'll learn the full Power BI suite of tools, the M programming language, and the DAX formula language, all while analyzing real-world datasets and building enterprise-level projects.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the questions.
Alright, let’s start off nice and easy 😀.
Power BI (Power Business Intelligence) by Microsoft is a powerful tool for interactive data visualization and business intelligence.
It handles complex and large datasets efficiently and allows data to be pulled from various sources, such as Excel spreadsheets and cloud-based SQL Server databases, transforming it into interactive, live dashboards and reports.
This visual experience enables non-technical business users to access and drill down into the data to uncover business insights.
This is crucial because it empowers analysts to turn raw data into meaningful visual representations, facilitating better decision-making and insights for non-technical stakeholders.
Power BI comes in three versions, each tailored to different needs:
The main differences are how they can scale to different organization sizes.
Power BI Desktop consists of several tools and components that work together to turn raw data into insightful visuals:
Understanding the synergy between Power Query, the Data Model, and DAX is crucial, and so you might be asked how to use these effectively together.
If asked how you might use these, a good response could be:
"I start by using Power Query to pull data from different sources and perform initial data cleaning and transformation. Then I create relationships between different tables in the Data Model. I define KPIs that incorporate those related datasets with DAX.
Finally, I leverage Power BI Desktop to create interactive reports and dashboards from the prepared data, which are then shared with the team for better decision-making."
Power Query in Power BI is a versatile tool for data connectivity and data preparation.
It can perform a variety of tasks such as:
These tasks are essential for preparing data for analysis, and ensuring that your data is clean, accurate, and properly formatted for creating reliable reports and dashboards.
Because of this, you might be asked about the functions of Power Query and how you use them in data preparation.
A good response could be:
"Power Query, accessible through the Query Editor in Power BI, is essential for data connectivity and preparation. It allows you to perform various tasks such as filtering rows to remove irrelevant data, merging multiple data sources to create a comprehensive dataset, transforming data types for consistency, pivoting and unpivoting data for better analysis, and grouping operations to aggregate data.
These capabilities allow people to clean, transform, and shape data effectively before using it in reports."
By detailing these tasks and their importance, you demonstrate a thorough understanding of Power Query's functionalities and their practical applications in data preparation.
Power BI can connect to a wide variety of data sources, spanning from traditional databases to cloud-based services and even online services such as social media.
Some common data sources include:
Understanding the variety of data sources helps in effectively integrating and analyzing data from multiple platforms, providing a comprehensive view of the business.
Power BI supports multiple connectivity modes and offers several refresh options, providing flexibility in how your data is updated and displayed.
Connectivity Modes:
Refresh Options:
Choosing the appropriate connectivity mode and refresh option ensures your data is up-to-date and displayed correctly, improving the reliability of your reports.
Data profiling is the process of examining, understanding, and cleaning data, and ensures the quality and integrity of the data, which are essential for accurate reporting and analysis
In Power BI, data profiling tasks are often performed in Power Query Editor, where you can visualize the distribution of data, see patterns, check for outliers, and validate against rules, among others.
Dashboards in Power BI Service are a crucial feature for consolidating and displaying key metrics and insights at a glance.
They allow users to create a single page, often called a canvas, that provides a real-time overview of the business through visualizations and metrics that are most important to stakeholders.
Here’s how it works:
A Power BI dashboard is made up of tiles, which are snapshots of your data pinned from reports or direct queries. These tiles can be rearranged and resized on the dashboard to create a highly customized view.
Dashboards can also incorporate elements like images, text boxes, and web content, making them not only functional but also visually appealing.
An effective dashboard provides a high-level snapshot of the company’s performance and can include interactive elements, such as drill-through features, to allow users to delve deeper into the data directly from the dashboard. This makes dashboards an excellent tool for executives or anyone needing quick insights without navigating through detailed reports.
Using dashboards effectively enhances decision-making by providing stakeholders with a real-time, comprehensive view of key metrics and trends.
Content packs in Power BI are pre-packaged collections of dashboards, reports, and datasets that provide out-of-the-box insights for services like Google Analytics and Microsoft Dynamics, so you can use a ready-made template.
Content packs speed up the process of gaining insights by providing ready-to-use reports and dashboards, making it easier for users to analyze data without starting from scratch.
Using content packs can also significantly reduce the time and effort required to set up reports and dashboards, allowing for quicker insights and more efficient data analysis.
Designing effective dashboards in Power BI involves more than just aggregating data into visuals. It requires thoughtful planning and design to ensure that the dashboard is user-friendly, informative, and actionable.
A well-designed dashboard allows users to quickly grasp essential insights necessary for decision-making, through a combination of simplicity, consistency, and relevance. This involves maintaining a clean and uncluttered layout, using consistent design elements across visuals, and ensuring every data element serves a specific purpose.
Incorporating visual hierarchy is key to directing attention to the most important information first, which can be highlighted through strategic placement and distinct coloring.
For example
For a dashboard monitoring real-time sales performance by region, you might place the most current metrics prominently at the top, perhaps using a gauge or ticker for instant visibility. Then quarterly trends could be shown using a line chart below the real-time data, allowing users to spot patterns at a glance.
TL;DR
Effective dashboard design ensures that users can quickly and easily interpret key metrics and insights, leading to more informed and timely decision-making.
Visualizations are key in Power BI, as they represent your data in a format that is easy to understand and interpret.
Power BI provides a wide variety of visuals out of the box, including but not limited to column charts, bar charts, line charts, scatter charts, pie charts, waterfall charts, funnel charts, and maps, and each type has its own use case.
For instance, column charts are great for comparing values across categories, while line charts are preferred for displaying trends over time.
Effective visualizations simplify complex data, making it easier to identify trends, patterns, and insights, which are crucial for informed decision-making.
To be a successful Power BI developer, mastering the art of data visualization is crucial. This means not just presenting data but transforming it into insightful and easily digestible visuals that can drive decision-making.
Effective data visualization entails creative decision-making to communicate complex data in an intuitive and compelling manner, blending aesthetics and functionality to make data accessible and engaging to diverse audiences.
The key to mastering this art lies in understanding the principles of design such as color, layout, and typography, along with the principles of data representation such as clarity, accuracy, and efficiency.
Visualizations should not only present data accurately but also tell a story, guiding the viewer to insights through intentional design choices like highlighting trends, patterns, or anomalies.
For example
Choosing the right type of chart for the data - whether it's a bar chart for comparisons, a line chart for trends, or a heat map for density - can significantly affect how well the audience understands the message.
TL;DR
Effective data visualizations simplify complex data, allowing viewers to grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns, leading to quicker and more informed decision-making.
Alright, let’s get a little more technical and talk about how to perform more complicated tasks.
Pros:
Cons:
Understanding the pros and cons helps in assessing when and where to effectively use Power BI, ensuring it meets the specific needs of the organization.
You may be asked which you would choose in a specific situation and why or why not, so be aware of these limitations.
When it comes to data visualization tools, Power BI and Tableau are often compared due to their popularity. Although they have overlapping functionalities, key differences exist:
Power BI:
Tableau:
Knowing the differences between these two will aid in selecting the right tool based on the organization's infrastructure, budget, and visualization needs.
Defining relationships between tables allows you to create meaningful insights by connecting related data across multiple tables.
For example
You might define a relationship between a Sales table and a Products table using the Product ID field that's common to both.
Power BI supports three types of relationships:
Properly defining relationships ensures accurate data modeling and meaningful analysis, which is crucial for reliable insights.
Data modeling in Power BI Desktop and Power Pivot for Excel differs in several ways. Understanding these differences can help you make the most of each tool and demonstrate your versatility in handling different BI tools.
Power BI Desktop:
Power Pivot for Excel:
Choosing the right tool based on data modeling needs ensures efficiency and accuracy in analysis.
Bi-directional cross-filtering is a feature that allows filters to flow in both directions between related tables. This provides more control over how data is filtered and can simplify the model by reducing the need for complex DAX formulas.
This feature enhances data model flexibility and accuracy, enabling more comprehensive analysis.
Filter context is a fundamental concept in Power BI that determines the data scope on which DAX formulas operate. It influences how measures calculate and return results in visualizations and reports, ensuring that calculations are relevant to the data being analyzed.
For example
When a measure is calculated in Power BI, it considers any filters that have been applied from slicers, visualizations, pages, and DAX formulas.
Properly understanding filter context ensures accurate and relevant calculations, and is critical for reliable reports and insights.
Misunderstanding filter context in Power BI can lead to significant issues in data analysis, primarily through the creation of measures and visualizations that produce inaccurate or misleading results.
Common pitfalls include incorrect aggregation of data and discrepancies in visualizations due to conflicting filter contexts.
Avoiding these pitfalls ensures the integrity and reliability of data analysis and reporting.
Data shaping involves changing the "shape" or structure of your data to make it more suitable for analysis.
In Power BI, you can apply several common data-shaping techniques like:
For example
Consider a table with a single column containing full names. (First name and last name combined).
Well, you could split this column into "First Name" and "Last Name" to facilitate a more specific analysis:
= Table.SplitColumn(Source, "FullName", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter(" ", QuoteStyle.Csv), {"FirstName", "LastName"})
These techniques are essential for preparing data for analysis, and ensuring the data is clean, accurate, and properly formatted for creating reliable reports and dashboards.
Query folding helps optimize performance by pushing data transformations back to the source database instead of performing them locally. This ensures that transformations are handled by the data source's more powerful processing capabilities, improving efficiency and performance in Power BI.
This is important because it minimizes local processing load, reducing resource usage and improving response times, especially when working with large datasets or complex transformations.
The M language is the programming language behind Power Query, a key component of Power BI that is used for data extraction and transformation. "M" stands for "mashup," signifying that this language is designed to combine, transform, and clean data from various sources.
You might be asked to write a few lines of "M language" during your interview, so it is worthwhile to get comfortable with it.
For example
You could create a new custom column with "M language" using a simple formula like this:
= Table.AddColumn(Source, "Custom", each [Column1] + [Column2])
Understanding M language allows for more advanced and customized data transformations, enhancing your ability to prepare data for analysis.
Themes provide a coherent color and design scheme to your reports and dashboards, enhancing their aesthetic value and improving readability. More importantly, you can use custom themes to align the report's look and feel with your company's branding guidelines.
Using themes ensures consistency and professionalism across reports, making them more engaging and easier to interpret.
Conditional formatting in Power BI allows you to change the appearance of cells, rows, and columns based on their value. This feature helps to highlight certain values, identify trends, and draw attention to specific data points.
For example
You might use conditional formatting to highlight sales figures that exceed targets in green and those that fall short in red.
This enhances the visual impact of your reports, making key data points stand out and facilitating quicker insights.
Filters and slicers are two essential elements in Power BI that you use to refine the data shown in visuals.
While both filters and slicers serve to limit the data that's displayed, slicers are meant to be used interactively on a report canvas, providing a more user-friendly filtering experience.
Using these tools effectively ensures that users can explore and analyze data in a way that meets their specific needs, enhancing the interactivity and usability of reports.
Responsive slicers dynamically adjust to different screen sizes and orientations. This feature ensures that visuals remain clear and accessible on any device, enhancing the report's appearance and usability.
Responsive slicers improve the user experience, especially for stakeholders who access reports on various devices, by maintaining the integrity and clarity of visualizations across different screen sizes.
Bookmarks in Power BI capture the current state of a report page, including filters, slicers, and the state of visuals. They are helpful when you want to showcase a particular view of your data or create a storytelling sequence in your report.
For example
You might create bookmarks to highlight different time periods or specific insights during a presentation.
Using bookmarks enhances the storytelling aspect of your reports, allowing you to guide users through specific insights and findings effectively.
Joining tables in SQL is a fundamental skill that enables you to combine data from two or more tables based on a related column between them.
It correctly ensures that you can effectively combine and analyze related data from multiple sources, providing comprehensive insights. This is particularly important in Power BI, where data from various sources is often brought together for analysis and visualization.
SQL supports several types of joins, each serving different purposes and use cases.
Common Types of Joins:
The choice of which type of join to use depends on the specific requirements of your query and the relationships between the tables. Making the correct choice is critical to ensure the completeness and accuracy of your query results.
For example
If you need to ensure that all records from the primary table are included regardless of whether they match the secondary table, a LEFT JOIN would be appropriate.
Clustered and non-clustered column charts are two types of visualizations in Power BI that help in representing data in an easily comprehensible form.
For example
If you have sales data by product category for each region, a clustered column chart would be helpful to compare sales across regions for each product category.
But, if you are interested in the contribution of each product category to total sales for each region, a non-clustered or stacked column chart would be a better choice.
Choosing the right type of column chart ensures that data is presented clearly and effectively, facilitating better comparisons and insights.
Power BI provides different views for different purposes:
General formatting in Power BI refers to the adjustment of the aesthetics of the reports and visuals to improve readability and comprehension. This includes basic formatting like color and font adjustments, to advanced formatting options such as conditionally changing colors based on data values.
Good formatting enhances data visualization, making it easier to understand and interpret. Furthermore, consistent formatting across reports enhances the professional appearance of the reports.
Power BI enables you to share dashboards and reports with other users within your organization.
This sharing can be done in a few ways, the most common of which is to publish your report to the Power BI service and then either share the report with specific people or distribute it via a link or an embedded code.
When it comes to external users, the Power BI service allows you to share content outside of your organization using Azure Active Directory B2B (Business to Business). This way, external users can access the shared content securely.
Securely sharing reports with external users ensures that stakeholders outside the organization can access up-to-date insights while maintaining data security and governance.
Alright so let’s finish up with a few questions that might stump you…
R and Python are programming languages that have gained popularity in the data science domain owing to their powerful data analysis and visualization libraries.
In Power BI, R and Python scripts can be utilized to prepare (cleanse and transform) data, create machine learning models, and create visualizations that are not natively available in Power BI.
For example
You might use R for complex statistical analysis or Python for advanced data manipulation and visualizations.
Integrating R and Python with Power BI allows for more advanced analytics and custom visualizations, enhancing the tool's capabilities and providing deeper insights.
Power BI gateways act as bridges that enable secure data transfer between your Power BI reports and data sources located on-premise.
There are two kinds of gateways in Power BI:
Using gateways effectively ensures secure and reliable data access for reports, whether for individual use or enterprise-wide deployment.
The Schedule Refresh feature in Power BI is used to keep your datasets up to date automatically. It is particularly useful when dealing with cloud-based or online data sources that frequently update.
With Schedule Refresh, you can set up time intervals at which Power BI automatically connects to your data source, imports the fresh data, and updates your datasets and reports.
For example
In a retail scenario where your cloud-based inventory data gets updated every couple of hours, scheduling a refresh ensures that your Power BI inventory report always shows the latest data without manual intervention.
Automating data refreshes ensures that reports and dashboards are always current, providing stakeholders with the most up-to-date information for decision-making.
Data lineage in Power BI provides visibility into the data journey - where it comes from, where it moves, and how it's transformed. It's crucial for understanding data sources, improving data quality, managing data transformations, ensuring compliance, and more.
Understanding data lineage helps in tracing data issues back to their source, ensuring data integrity, and maintaining compliance with data governance standards.
Power BI also offers extensions beyond its standard visual capabilities (like bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs) through Custom Visuals.
They can be created by anyone and shared with others, allowing for unique, tailored visual representations of data that wouldn’t be possible with the standard set of visuals.
It’s worth noting that some TypeScript or JavaScript skills - and ideally familiarity with the D3 JavaScript library - are typically needed to create these custom visuals.
Custom visuals allow for better alignment with specific business objectives and more efficient data communication, providing a higher degree of customization in reporting.
There you have it - 36 of the most common Power BI questions and answers that you might encounter in an interview for a data analytics role using Power BI.
How did you fare? Did you nail all 36 questions? If so, it might be time to move from studying to actively interviewing!
Didn't get them all? Got tripped up on a few? Don't worry; I'm here to help.
If you want to fast-track your Power BI knowledge and interview prep and get as much hands-on practice as possible, then check out my complete Power BI bootcamp course.
In this course, you can follow along from start to finish, mastering everything from the fundamentals to advanced Power BI concepts and features.
Plus, once you join, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions in our private Discord community from me, other students and working data professionals.
If you join or not, I just want to wish you the best of luck with your interview!