Description
This course introduces the core concepts and workflows of modern business intelligence using Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is a powerful, end-to-end platform for ingesting, modeling, visualizing, and sharing data across an organization. In this course, you'll learn how to connect to a variety of data sources, transform raw data into a clean model, craft interactive reports and dashboards, and publish them securely to the Power BI Service. By automating data refreshes and managing access, you'll deliver timely, insightful analytics to stakeholders with minimal manual effort.
These skills are especially valuable for corrections analysts who must track facility populations, incident trends, and recidivism metrics in real time. You'll learn how to build dashboards that support data-driven decision-making in correctional environments—helping administrators allocate resources more effectively, monitor compliance, and enhance safety across facilities.
The aim is not to make you a BI architect overnight, but to equip you with the skills to build, deploy, and maintain robust Power BI solutions. Through hands-on modules, you'll explore best practices for data modeling, visualization design, and governance so your reports remain accurate, efficient, and easy to consume.
Intended Audience
This course is tailored for analysts, policy researchers, and program evaluators working in the corrections environment who wish to streamline their reporting workflows. Learners should have basic data management and analytical experience. This is not a statistics course, though you will apply simple summarization and visualization techniques. Rather, it draws on reproducible research principles and practical tools to meet the specific needs of corrections analysts.
Participants must be able to install and run Power BI on Windows machines (with administrative privileges). The basic desktop version of Power BI is free to download, but the functionality will differ based on your organization's use of Microsoft tools. The course walks you through every setup step so you can focus on building reliable, automated reports.
Learning Objectives
After completing this course, learners should be able to do the following:
- Leverage Power Query, DAX measures, and custom visuals in Power BI to model correctional facility resident data, incident rate reports, and intake and release trend analyses that update automatically for ongoing operational oversight.
- Connect and transform data from multiple sources (Excel, CSV, databases, web APIs) using Power Query and the Data Model.
- Design a semantic data model with tables, relationships, and calculated measures using DAX for effective analysis.
- Build interactive reports and dashboards using Power BI Desktop's visualization tools, slicers, and custom visuals.
- Publish, schedule, and share reports via the Power BI Service, configuring data refreshes, workspaces, and security.
Structure
The course is organized into lessons that are meant to be completed sequentially. Each lesson includes a video introduction to the topic or technique with an example or demo of the topic being implemented, as well as an opportunity to put into practice some or all of the material presented in the lesson through a practical exercise.
| Lesson | Lesson Objectives |
|---|---|
| 1: Power BI Essentials and Data Connectivity |
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| 2: Data Shaping and Modeling with Power Query |
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| 3: Designing Interactive Reports |
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| 4: Deployment, Automation, and Governance |
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| 5: Comparative Overview of Tableau Desktop and Looker Studio |
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Resources
- Power BI Homepage — official homepage of Power BI by Microsoft
- Power BI User Documentation — official Power BI user documentation by Microsoft
- Power BI YouTube Channel — official Power BI YouTube channel
Estimated Time to Complete
10 hours
Keywords
Business intelligence, visualization, reporting, Power BI, dashboards
