Chapter 1 - Power BI Launch and a Starter Database

01-01 - What we’re here for… (13 min.) Sample Lesson Quiz: 01-01 - What we’re here for…
01-02 - Installation and First Visualization (10 min.) Quiz: 01-02 - Installation and First Visualization
01-03 - Five Minutes to Wow on an ARIES database (12 min.) Quiz: 01-03 - Five Minutes to Wow on an ARIES database
01-04 - Customizing a Single Graph (12 min.) Quiz: 01-04 - Customizing a Single Graph
01-05 - Multi-Visualization Reports (16 min.) Quiz: 01-05 - Multi-Visualization Reports
01-06 - Modifying Data Connections and The Service (8 min.) Quiz: 01-06 - Modifying Data Connections and The Service

Chapter 2 - Deep Dive on the Front End

02-01 - Thorough Tour of Power BI (16 min.) Quiz: 02-01 - Thorough Tour of Power BI
02-02 - Add Data and Build a Visual (15 min.) Quiz: 02-02 - Add Data and Build a Visual
02-03 - Data Modeling & Data Tables (11 min.) Quiz: 02-03 - Data Modeling & Data Tables
02-04 - Two Tables in One Visual (17 min.) Quiz: 02-04 - Two Tables in One Visual
02-05 - Slice and Dice Your Data (13 min.) Quiz: 02-05 - Slice and Dice Your Data
02-06 - Discovering DAX (14 min.) Quiz: 02-06 - Discovering DAX
02-07 - Power Query for Data QC (18 min.) Quiz: 02-07 - Power Query for Data QC
02-08 - The Scatter Plot (9 min.) Quiz: 02-08 - The Scatter Plot
02-09 - Line Plots & More DAX (18 min.) Quiz: 02-09 - Line Plots & More DAX
02-10 - DAX for Production Calcs (20 min.) Quiz: 02-10 - DAX for Production Calcs
02-11 - Cumulative DAX and Using AI (17 min.) Quiz: 02-11 - Cumulative DAX and Using AI

Chapter 3 - Tackling Transactions

03-01 - Importing Data and the Date Hierarchy (23 min.) Quiz: 03-01 - Importing Data and the Date Hierarchy
03-02 - OPEX Dashboard and Data Model Schemas (21 min.) Quiz: 03-02 - OPEX Dashboard and Data Model Schemas
03-03 - Vendor Coding and Drill Through Tables (25 min.) Quiz: 03-03 - Vendor Coding and Drill Through Tables
03-04 - Basic Lease Operating Statement (25 min.) Quiz: 03-04 - Basic Lease Operating Statement

Chapter 4: Philosophy & Architecture

04-01 - The 31 Flavors of Power BI (16 min.) Quiz: 04-01 - The 31 Flavors of Power BI
04-02 - The Power Platform Multiverse (19 min.) Quiz: 04-02 - The Power Platform Multiverse
04-03 - Languages and the Service (25 min.) Quiz: 04-03 - Languages and the Service
04-04 - Useful Resources (11 min.) Quiz: 04-04 - Useful Resources
04-05 - So You’ve Inherited a Bunch of Power BI Reports… (13 min.) Quiz: 04-05 - So You’ve Inherited a Bunch of Power BI Reports…

Chapter 5: Power BI for Report Consumers

05-01 - What even is BI? (14 min.) Quiz: 05-01 - What even is BI?
05-02 - Using Reports Online (13 min.) Quiz: 05-02 - Using Reports Online
05-03 - Customizing Your Own Report (15 min.) Quiz: 05-03 - Customizing Your Own Report

Introduction To Power BI - (2025 Update) / Chapter 1 - Power BI Launch and a Starter Database

Lesson 01-01 - What we’re here for…

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: What we're here for...02. Are you in the right class?!03. Who are these nerds?04. Wait, haven't you already done this?05. Chapter Outline 06. Intermediate Chapter Outline 07. BI Tools - Trends and Context 08. What do we mean by BI?09. Strengths for Power BI 10. What the heck is fabric?11. Our approach for this class 12. Who we are

01. Lesson 1.01: What we're here for...

Welcome. This is Intro to Power BI for Oil and Gas, Lesson 1.01 What we're here for.

02. Are you in the right class?!

Are you in the right class? This is the first and most important question. This is the right class for you if you want to use Power BI with oil and gas data, because that's what we're going to teach. If you have, I'd say intermediate or better skills with either Excel or Spotfire, we're not going to teach Excel, we're not going to teach Spotfire, but those kinds of skills are going to put you in a position to really succeed with Power BI. And third, if you are beginner to intermediate level with Power BI. If you're advanced, this is not going to be any fun for you. If you're intermediate, you'll learn some things. If you were expecting your teacher to be any of these people, you are in the wrong class. Go back to your movie of choice. I will say these chapters are designed to be independent, particularly the last couple of chapters. So chapters 1, 2 and 3 will build on each other with a lot of hands-on examples. But as we get to 4 and 5, you may have somebody in your organization that has no business watching a full 8 hours of Power BI videos (or however the heck long this thing is going to be), but just needs to snack on some of those topics. So take a look at this outline coming up for exactly what that will look like.

03. Who are these nerds?

Who are these nerds? That's me on the left. I'm Zach Warren. I've got over 20 years as a reservoir engineer and data analytics guy. I started my career at ExxonMobil. Worked for Netherland Sewell, areserves auditor, as well as a number of other operators. The guy that looks suspiciously like Lieutenant Riker from the Star Trek Enterprise is on the right. That's Michael Hirsch. He also has a lot of experience as a reservoir engineer. Together we act as project managers for most of the work that Velocity Insight does, which is our consulting firm.

04. Wait, haven't you already done this?

Wait, haven't you already done this before? Yes, we did record this wholeclass back in early 2022, but that class is getting pretty old. There's been 3.5 years worth of Power BI updates, which is probably 40 versions since then. We've taught a couple of dozen in-person Power BI classes since then, so hopefully we've gotten better just by making a lot of mistakes. You have all of my dorky jokes in the previous class, but you were missing Michael's dorky jokes, so that's a big plus for this class. And then the last time this was recorded, I acted as the videographer, and I put that in air quotes because I didn't know what I was doing. I did it in my basement. I was recovering from COVID. It was a bad time. This time I have an actual paid professional videographer. It's going to be a lot better.

05. Chapter Outline

Here's our chapter outline. We'll start with getting Power BI installed and setting you up with a starter database. We'll do a really deep dive into thefront end. So Michael will teach that chapter as we go very deep into how to use matrices and tables and line charts and bar charts. Then we're going to use some accounting data to build like an operating expense dashboard or a lease operating statement. There are so many companies who have these or need these. So we'll walk through some very specific examples there. Chapter 4 is on Power BI infrastructure and architecture. We'll kind of talk about what's behind the scenes and how things fit together. And then Chapter 5 is again one of these more snackable chapters really built for consumers. So if you're not trying to author new Power BI reports, but you're just trying to consume something that somebody else has built, you can skip straight over to chapter 5 and you'll learn a lot of that.
Another reason that we've rebuilt this class is because we've now got an intermediate Power BI for oil and gas class. Here's the chapter outline for that. We go really deep into DAX and Power Query and data modeling concepts. So we've made some changes to this course to feed more directly into the intermediate class. So if you're interested in going pretty far down that road, boy, there are hours and hours where you can listen to us talk. And that's a great thing. So enjoy.

07. BI Tools - Trends and Context

Let's step back and talk about business intelligence tools in general. So for a long time now, Excel has been the dominant way for people to look at, visualize, play with data. The joke is that Excel is the world's most popular business intelligence tool even though it isn't branded as a business intelligence tool. I 100% think that's correct. I don't think that's ever going to change. Excel has a flexibility and usefulness that is very different from a business intelligence tool.Microsoft enjoyed that for a long time, and then eventually Spotfire and Tableau and some other tools came onto the market and started to shift things up, right? They had the ability to access much larger data sets. They could do report distribution a lot better than Excel could. And I think eventually Microsoft realized what was going on, and in 2015 they released Power BI. So they were something like 5 or 10 years late to the game in a lot of ways, but very quickly just poured their dump trucks worth of cash onto the Power BI product, integrated it with a lot of the other stuff, and are now in a spot where they're kind of the clear winner from a Gartner perspective. Gartner and Forrester are companies that do sort of industry agnostic software evaluations. There's a link here in the slides to a report on that, but it's way up and to the right in terms of capabilities.
One interesting thing is in the most recent version of this, Spotfire actually isn't on the chart. They decided to withdraw from the Gartner process. I think they're sort of repositioning themselves away from being a pure business intelligence tool and towards some other capabilities. I love Spotfire. I used it for a decade. There's a lot of things that Spotfire is flat out better at than Power BI is. And then there's a lot of things where Power BI is better than Spotfire. We talk about that a lot in the intermediate class. You'll see a whole lesson talking about sort of how to migrate from Spotfire to Power BI and in which situations you should use one or the other. I'm ecstatic that Brian McDowell teaches the Spotfire class on the SAGA platform because frankly, he's a much better Spotfire user than I ever was, because I became a manager part way through my Spotfire career, which means you no longer develop new technical skills.

08. What do we mean by BI?

What do we mean by BI or business intelligence? BI tools have a lot of different use cases. The first and foremost that I've used a lot as a reservoir engineer is data discovery. I want to connect to a data set and figure out what the heck is inside it. The second is reporting. Now that I've understood what's going on, I want to tell other people, or maybe I even just want to tell myself, remind myself of what is happening in the business. That routine, standardized generation of an analysis is very important for a lot of workflows. And then final is sort of predictive analytics. Reporting is what happened historically, and predictive analytics is what do I think is going to happen in the future based on previous trends. And all of these sort of fit together because they have very similar underlying technical needs. The software features that you need in order to be effective at data discovery are very similar to what you need for reporting and are very similar to what you need for predictive analytics. So you see those use cases sort of bundled together in a modern business intelligence tool.
You also notice that business intelligence tools have an enormous range of users with an enormous range of needs. So, just from like a title and discipline perspective, we have engineers and geoscientists, we have accountants and landmen, and finance and field operations people, all kinds of different disciplines. And they often have a very wide range of software and technology needs. So a good business intelligence tool, properly implemented, has to be able to handle this very wide range of folks that are coming to the table. We also have a really wide range of delivery modes. I spend my life at a keyboard, that's why I got carpal tunnel syndrome a few years ago. I'm used to working with these tools on a desktop, but there's a lot of situations in a company where a tablet or an iPhone or an Android phone may be more appropriate. And so we'll talk a little bit in this class about how those fit together in the larger Power BI infrastructure.

09. Strengths for Power BI

Some particular strengths for Power BI. As a Microsoft product, it's really designed as a bridge from traditional on-premises Excel for analysis into Azure, into the cloud, right. It's got a very rapid learning curve for most Excel users. It was designed that way. If you have comfort and familiarity with things like pivot tables or VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH (if you're really cool), you're going to find your Excel skills are going to migrate over into Power BI pretty smoothly. It also really cues organizations up for moving into the cloud. I think this was a much bigger issue 5 or 10 years ago where cloud was scary to a lot of CEOs and IT departments. And that's just not the case anymore. I think most of our clients, and frankly most EMP companies now are very comfortable with the idea that their data is in the cloud. But if yours is hesitant there, working with Power BI will help your organization understand a little bit better what that's going to feel like in the long term. Because it's Microsoft, it's especially well suited to Azure, which is the name for Microsoft's cloud, but it also works with other cloud platforms.
Second big strength, it is very IT friendly. You can use Active Directory, which has now been named Intra ID, one of the worst marketing decisions I've ever seen. It uses Microsoft's multi-factor authentication. So it's the exact same credentialing and permissions that you're used to using with Outlook on your phone or OneDrive or any of those other applications. And then the mobile app requires basically zero setup from your IT department. In fact, they have to go intentionally turn it off. So vs. some of the other platforms where you've got a lot of work to do to get to the point where you can distribute reports all the way to an iPhone in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, or someplace like that, that's very, very easy in the Power BI world.
Then holy smokes, is it cheap? The desktop version is free. That's what we're going to use predominantly in this class. The Pro version, which is for web and mobile users and authoring new reports, is $14/month. Or if you have the right kind of Microsoft license, it's free. Premium per user, which we'll talk about in Chapter 4, has a lot of extra features, and it's just another $10/month on top of that. It's roughly 1/10 the price of Spotfire, maybe even less than that now that Spotfire has raised some prices. So from an affordability perspective, to roll out reporting for a hundred or a thousand people in an organization, Microsoft has positioned themselves to be really, really competitive from a cost perspective.

10. What the heck is fabric?

What the heck is Fabric? You will likely see Fabric logos, the Fabric name, show up as you're working with Power BI. And frankly, it's mostly marketing, a little bit of product. I talk about this a little bit here, I'll talk about it more later, but it's it's this idea that Microsoft wants a unified data platform similar to Office. I think it's going reasonably well. I don't love what they're doing with Fabric, but it is very interesting. There's some particular products that I think are cool, like OneLake storage and the Direct Lake mode for Power BI, but basically ignore that for purposes of this class. Once we're on to intermediate and more advanced topics, those features in Fabric will start to become more relevant. You can think of Power BI as shown here as a subcomponent of Fabric, and you're just staying inside of your Power BI world and working very happily and making good, useful products for other people in your organization.

11. Our approach for this class

Our approach in this class is to basically do 1/3 each of tell, show, and do. So the tell and show periods, I hear I sound a lot smarter when I'm played back at 1.2 or 1.3. The do parts, I strongly recommend slow that thing down, take your time, make sure that you're following along because getting hands-on with this is going to make it considerably easier for you to actually use it in your job. You're going to take home some real PBIX files that you could use to remind yourself how the heck you did something down the road. Power BI is pretty good at sort of self-documentation. So you can go back and look at something that you built in the past or that even someone else built in the past and kind of reverse engineer it to figure out what's going on. And then hopefully you'll have a lot of ideas about where to go and what to work on next. Some examples, obviously. Some resources, like, hey, here are the people that I go to when I'm curious on how to solve a problem who have good YouTube channels and stuff like that. So that's our approach for the class. I hope you really enjoy things.

12. Who we are

A little bit about who we are. We're basically an oil and gas data analytics team for hire. There's about 10 people on our team, and we work for mostly smaller EMP companies, data warehousing, integration, BI. We also have an advisory and and digital strategy practice. But we're not here to talk about any of that stuff. We're here to talk about Power BI. So let's go on to lesson 1.02.