New: Roadmaps ordered paths through our cheat sheets and flashcards, so you always know what to study next.
Explore themSee what's new on GitHubFrom the Excel sheet you already know to a Power BI dashboard powered by real DAX measures.
A 12-step learning path. Follow it in order, or jump to what you need.
This path is for anyone in an office role, finance, marketing, HR, or operations, who already lives in Excel and wants to move into Power BI without learning to code or write SQL. Plan on about 6 to 10 weeks at a few hours a week, moving from the Excel tools you already use through Power Query, data modeling, and DAX to a published Power BI dashboard. It does not cover SQL, inferential statistics, or Tableau in depth; that ground belongs to the Data Analyst path, and it treats enterprise governance and semantic-model architecture as a lighter touch than the BI Analyst path covers in full. By the end you can build a Power BI data model with real relationships, write DAX measures that recalculate as filters change, and publish a dashboard your manager can open and trust without you in the room.
No prior experience needed. Start from zero.
Open this first: the pivot tables and lookup formulas here are the spreadsheet reflexes every later step, from Power Query to DAX, assumes you can already do.
Power Query and Power Pivot show up inside the Excel you already opened in step 1, so this is where you meet Power BI's engine before ever leaving the spreadsheet.
Take everything Power Query and Power Pivot hinted at in step 2 and open it in the tool built around them: connecting a real data source is the first thing that makes this feel like a job, not a worksheet.
You can build a working Power Query and pivot table workflow in Excel and open Power BI to connect that first real data source, no more waiting on someone else to hand you a report. Next up: turning that raw connection into a model that behaves.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Step 3's Get & Transform screen runs on this language underneath; learning M directly is how you clean a messy export instead of hoping the automatic suggestions guess right.
This is where flat-sheet thinking stops working: expect to rebuild your mental model more than once before fact tables, dimension tables, and relationships stop feeling like extra homework and start feeling obvious.
The model from step 5 only pays off once you can calculate against it; DAX's filter context is the second idea that has to click, and CALCULATE is where most people finally feel it click.
You can build a relationships-based data model and write a DAX measure that recalculates itself as filters change, the two ideas that make Power BI click instead of feel like a foreign tool; a few minutes of due flashcards keeps step 1's Excel formulas sharp while you build on them. Next up: turning that model into something people actually look at.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
A working measure from step 6 still needs the right chart around it; this is the perception research behind why some visuals get read at a glance and others get skipped.
Put step 7's chart choices into a single screen a manager checks every morning: layout, color coding, and the five-second rule are what separate a KPI dashboard from a wall of charts.
The dashboard from step 8 only helps someone if they can open it without emailing you first: publishing, permissions, and the governance habits that keep a shared report trustworthy live here.
You can choose the chart that fits the question, design a KPI dashboard that reads in five seconds, and publish it through Power BI's sharing tools so a colleague can open it without you in the room. Next up: a couple of extra planning tools and the story that makes the dashboard land.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Take this if your role leans toward budgeting or forecasting: Goal Seek and Scenario Manager extend the Excel formulas from step 1 into what-if models that Power BI's own parameters can later pick up.
Consider this if you're weighing a move toward a full BI Analyst role: it zooms out from the tool-specific tables in steps 3 through 6 to the vocabulary, KPIs, and architecture patterns that role assumes.
Everything from step 1's pivot table to step 9's published dashboard is still just numbers until you frame them; this closing step is how you turn what you built into the story that gets your manager to actually act.
You can take a raw Excel export, clean and model it, calculate it in DAX, and publish a dashboard that turns into a story your manager acts on instead of a spreadsheet they ignore, the complete loop the Excel to Power BI badge certifies.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Finish every required step, at least 70% of them genuinely done (not skipped), to earn this badge and 500 XP.