From the course: Power BI Essential Training

What you need for this course - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Essential Training

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What you need for this course

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- [Instructor] In this course, we are going to start out with the Power BI service, and then in the last chapter, we will move to Power BI Desktop. This movie covers what you will need if you want to work along with me, which I highly recommend. Let's talk first about hardware. Microsoft recommends 2 GB of available RAM in order to run Power BI desktop, and 4 GB or more is recommended. I would tell you, if you are planning to use Power BI on a routine basis, even more is better. If I'm running Power BI desktop and trying to analyze even relatively simple data sets with only 2 GB of available RAM, it is a totally underwhelming experience. I'm currently running a machine with 32 GB of RAM, and that's primarily because of Power BI. Your CPU, 1 GHz or faster with a 64-bit processor. And again, the faster, the better. Although, with a 3 GHz processor, I am rarely waiting while I'm using Power BI. Display settings are something that most of us adjust once when we have a new PC, and then we ignore it. But with Power BI, you'll want to be attentive, because if your screen display is set incorrectly, Power BI will still show a full window. It's just that some of it will be off your screen. So, you'll want to have a display of 1440x900, or 1600x900 if you're in that 16x9 screen orientation. In a similar vein, you'll want to make sure that your text display is set for 100% or less. It's really common now for us to set our display high, and then set the text at an even higher percentage, 125 or 150. But if you do that, you will have issues with Power BI. The bottom line, be attentive to your display with Power BI, even if you haven't had to be with any other software you've installed. Regarding software, Power BI is meant to be run on Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 or later. Most of us will run it on Windows 10 or 11. The change here is that Windows 7 is no longer supported for Power BI use. You will also need .NET 4.6.2 or later and the latest version of whatever browser you're using, perhaps Edge Chromium, Google Chrome, Safari. You will also need Power BI Pro, and I'll talk to you more about this in the first chapter of the course. And you will be downloading Power BI Desktop, and I'll show you how to do that in the last chapter of the course. There are three different ways Power BI is licensed. Power BI itself is the free version, which will allow you to do about 70% of what I'll show you in this course. To work along with all or almost all the demos, you'll want Power BI Pro, which has a license fee, but don't worry. I'll show you how to get around that in one of the next movies. You might also have in your organization Power BI Premium, and if you do, that's just fine as well. Licensing also affects your use of Copilot. All of the Power platform applications have Copilot built in and available except for Power BI. If you want to use Copilot and Power BI, your organization must have a Premium Power BI or Fabric tenant. The current cost for this type of tenant is $5,000 per month, so most small and mid-size organizations aren't investing in Copilot for Power BI. I will show you what you can do with Copilot if you have it, but you do not need to have Copilot to work effectively in Power BI or to work along with me in this course. So, how about your data skills? I assume that you know something about how to work with data, because Power BI is all about visualizing data. For example, if you're working in Excel and you know how to enter, edit, and format text and numbers, you know how to use the table commands, you know how to find, replace, and sort and filter data and how to insert and format charts, you will do well here in Power BI because those are exactly the kind of skills that you'll want to bring to this party. If you are not an experienced Excel user and you would like a refresher on any of this, I heartily recommend Oz du Soleil's course Excel: Managing and Analyzing Data, which you'll find in the LinkedIn Learning Library. If you want to buff up, feel free to leave me, go visit Oz, then come back here, and we'll continue with Power BI. One more thought. This course will teach you how to create reports and dashboards and semantic models in Microsoft Power BI. If you work in an organization where you are already receiving reports and dashboards that you need to be able to use not two weeks from now, but tomorrow, you don't need to create new ones, but you only need to use the ones that already exist for right now, then you might consider starting with Getting Started with Power BI. This is an end users' course, and you will find this in the LinkedIn Learning Library. Let's continue.

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