Forum Discussion
Complete Newbie looking for direction
Hello, and hoping someone could help me in getting started with Power Bi, particularly with pulling in and manipulating data from a SAS Cube, hopefully dynamically.
As a little background, I feel I am a pretty well skilled at Excel, having built numerous reports and dashboards by pulling in information from a SAS connection using CubeFormula's. And also have some decent skills at VBA scripting including custom menus with RibbonX.
For example, I have various reports that connect to a SAS cube, and then dynamically pull in sales data, etc by simply changing the value of the 'department', 'date', or changing between actuals, budget, forecast, etc. Basically building a CubeValue formula that just reads the values in other cells (dropdown lists, etc) And have combined that with various sliders and other tools in making some dynamic dashboards for the end user.
And now I have recently been introduced to Power Bi, and still very new to it. I have not needed to use either Power Pivot or Power Query in the past, so learning how these work with Power Bi is still a bit new as well.
One of my end goals is to build a few live reports built in Power Bi that connect to the SAS cube where the user can choose divisions, departments, etc filter and see the data they are looking for.
I'm also open to any recommended books, especially if they help show and explain how to pull and manipulate SAS Cube data. That is how I learned most of my VBA. IMO nothing beats a good book/tutorial.
3 Replies
Welcome to the land of Power BI... you'll love it!
I'm sure you'll get many recommendations, but let me give you 4 that I've found invaluable:
- Start by doing the Power BI Dashboard in a Day. It's a series of labs that will get you hands-on step-by-step, it's self-paced and free: https://aka.ms/diad
- Bookmark https://www.sqlbi.com/, watch their two free introductory courses: Introducing DAX and Introduction to data modeling for Power BI and pickup a hardcopy (or two!) of The Definitive Guide to DAX.
- Go watch the awesome videos from Sam McKay at Enterprise DNA: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2rBgj4M1tzK-urTZ28zcA
- Pickup a copy of Collect, Combine, and Transform Data Using Power Query in Excel and Power BI by Gil Raviv.
Thank you for the various links and book recommedations and I hope to begin watching and reading up on them soon.
I think part of my initial troubles is actually getting a live connection. This may have to do with permissions or something else and I have reached out to our outside company as well.
When I connect to our Olap cubes in excel, we enter the url path which is a type of dll file along with a username and password.. ie,
https://path/to/file/myconnectionfile.dll
I can get that to work with the Import, but not Live Connection. And then after the import I then seem to have to bring in each member or table separately.
Again, still learning and feeling my way around. But I will start with some of the links and books and hopefully start getting my feet wet soon.
Thanks,
PT
Edit; I think I just learned that a live connection only works with your window's credentials, and I connect to our cube with a different username/pass.
Question: If I created a live connection, is it secure?
Answer: Yes. Your current Windows credentials are used to connect to the Analysis Services server. You can't use basic or stored credentials in either the Power BI service or Power BI Desktop when exploring live.
