Power BI Advanced: DAX & Complex Reports

This course goes beyond the basics and empowers you to create dynamic visuals, apply powerful DAX formulas, and design reports that drive better business decisions.

Across two hands-on days, you'll learn how to build calculated measures, optimise layouts, apply drill-down and drill-through functionality, and explore advanced visuals including maps, KPIs and tooltips. You'll also cover best practices in report design, governance, row-level security, and scheduled data refreshes – all with a clear business context.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Create compelling, insight-driven reports with advanced visualisations

• Use DAX to build custom measures and calculated columns for deeper analysis

• Apply filters, slicers, drill-throughs, and tooltips to enhance user interactivity

• Design professional, branded reports that are optimised for usability and clarity

• Manage sharing, workspace governance, and data refresh settings for live dashboards

Who Is This Course For?

This course is ideal for:

• Power BI users ready to move beyond the basics and create more powerful reports

• Analysts, managers or data champions responsible for producing visual reports

• Anyone looking to build confidence in DAX, interactivity features and publishing workflows

Prerequisites: You should already be comfortable with the Power BI interface, connecting to data, and creating basic visuals. If you're brand new to Power BI, we recommend starting with our Power BI Essentials: Create Interactive Reports course.

Course Outline

Report Building with Power BI

• Intro to DAX & Calculated Columns

• Implicit vs Explicit Measures

• Writing Common DAX Functions:  SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, DISTINCTCOUNT

• Time Intelligence: MTD, QTD, YTD, Prior Year

• Understanding CALCULATE and filter context

• Quick Measures & creating reusable logic

Filters, Slicers & Interactivity

• Filter types: basic, advanced, relative

• Using the Field, Format & Analytics Panes

• Slicers: dropdowns, sliders, date slicers, and slicer syncing

• Building tabular reports and Excel-style pivot tables

• Matrix layouts and conditional formatting

• Creating and using Parameters

Report Functionality & Drill Capabilities

• Adding drill-downs and drill-through reports

• Filtering by relative dates

• Viewing underlying data

• Managing cross-filtering between visuals

• Exporting data from reports

Data Visualisation & Layout Design

• Choosing the right visuals for the data story

• Using custom visuals (maps, KPIs, ribbon & bullet charts)

• Optimising reports with tooltips and visual alignment tips

• Using logos, icons, branding & page sizing effectively

• Formatting tricks for clean, readable design

Governance, Sharing & Refresh

• Understanding and applying Row Level Security

• Creating/testing security roles

• Publishing models and dashboards to Power BI Service

• Sharing dashboards and managing access via Workspaces

• Connecting to MS Teams and using Apps

• Scheduling data refreshes with the Gateway

• On-demand vs scheduled refreshes

Reflections & Action Planning

• Review of key takeaways

• Sharing report ideas and real-world applications

• Planning next steps for embedding Power BI into your reporting culture