Power BI for Developers — DAX, Power Query, and Data Modeling
A developer's guide to Power BI: DAX formulas, Power Query (M language), data modeling, and thinking beyond drag-and-drop.
Power BI is Microsoft's BI tool, and it's everywhere. Over 300,000 organizations use it. If you work in enterprise development — especially in Microsoft-stack shops — you'll encounter Power BI reports, be asked to build data sources for them, or need to build them yourself.
The drag-and-drop demo looks simple. Drag a field onto a chart. Add a filter. Done. But real Power BI development goes much deeper. Behind every polished dashboard is a data model, DAX formulas for calculations, and Power Query transformations for data cleaning. Understanding these layers turns you from someone who makes pretty charts into someone who builds reliable, performant BI solutions.
The Three Layers of Power BI
Layer 1: Power Query (Get and Clean Data)
Power Query is Power BI's data tra
This lesson is part of the Guild Member curriculum. Plans start at $29/mo.