Top 40 Power BI Interview Questions and Answers for 2023

Introduction

Power BI has grabbed the attention of industries all around the world. With the ability to make futuristic decisions with a progressive and beneficial outlook towards the companies, power BI holds a very important share in the growth and upliftment of the business.

There is high demand for BI developers. All the streams that come under Bi like BI Engineers, BI Data Analysts, BI Developers, Power BI Data Analyst, Power BI Business Analyst, Power BI Software Engineer, Senior BI Analyst, etc
If you are a aspiring for BI field career for yourself. This article will guide you and prepare you to crack the Power BI interview. Let's look at some of the frequently asked questions you may experience during an interview.

Top 40 Power BI Interview Questions and Answers for 2023

1. What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence tool. Microsoft introduced Power BI in 2013. Today it is considered the most advanced BI tool and has surpassed several competitors and traditional BI tools.
Power BI helps you create a rapport using Data Modelling and remodel the data in Power Query Editor before transferring it into Power BI for visuals. The Data Analyst creates interactive reports and dashboards with the help of the DAX formula and artthimatics.

Power BI is a powerful business analytics tool that allows you to share business insights across the company. This tool also embeds all the useful data into the company app or website. The solution involves multiple services and smart ideas for generating business growth.
Power BI adequately provides the following solutions:

• Relate to information
• Create visual reports and dashboards.
• Use the Power BI service to share reports with the company.
• Data conversion and modeling
• Make graphs and charts.

3. What is a Power BI Dashboard?

Power BI dashboard is the canvas, that makes use of images to translate the message. A well-designed dashboard focuses only on the crisp part of the narrative and it is restrained to just one page.

4. Mention Power BI Versions?

At present, there are three available Power BI versions. Power BI free, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium

Power BI Free : 

It is primarily used to get acquainted with Power BI and allows single users to create and publish dashboards and reports for projects. This is where its function is slightly defined, however, the access to share those reports within the company or create App workspaces or install APIs and controls. You can shift to Power BI Pro for more access.

Power BI Pro:

With the Power BI Pro, you can share your data, reports, and dashboards with other users who own a Power BI Pro license. You can also create App workspaces. Both Power BI Free and Pro have a 10 GB data storage limit and individual files for each are enclosed at 1 GB. Power BI Pro offers a full suite of services for professional BI users.

Power BI Premium:

Power BI Premium efficiently faces the challenges of large industry deployments and workloads and tasks.

Some of the important Power BI premium features are:

• Bigger storage
• Your company gets up to 100 TB of data storage to share in Power BI Premium.
• Bigger datasets
• With Power BI Premium you can work with datasets up to 50 GB in size.
• Free user-sharing access
• Free users can consume shared dashboards with Power BI Premium.

5. Explain what is visualization in Power BI?

In Power BI, we have the design space where all the elements of a report, different visuals, slicers/filters, etc. These factors, added to the design canvas, are called tiles. All the visuals available in Power BI are put under the Visualization Pane. 
The general visuals such as bar, pie, line, column, map, etc are present in the visualization pane. Along with them, we do not have very common visuals like waterfalls, funnels, gauges, etc. many customized reports can be imported into the reports from the application and can be implemented into the design view.
By using R or Python we have the option to create visuals using code. 

6. Mention the types of Power BI visualization.

The most common types of visualizations in Power BI are; 

• Area charts
• Doughnut charts
• Funnel charts
• Gauge charts
• Key influencers chart
• Bar and column charts
• Combo charts
• Decomposition tree

7. What is Power BI Services?

Power BI is a set of software services, applications, and integrated systems that work together to help you generate, distribute, and transform business insights in the most adequate way for your company. The SaaS (Software as a Service) component of Power BI is the Microsoft Power BI service, which is referred to as Power BI online. 
Dashboards in the Power BI service keep track of all your business activities. Dashboards display the tiles that you may click to pitch reports for detail verification. Dashboards and reports are linked to databases, which collect all important data in one place.

8. What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot is an alternative developed by Microsoft for Excel. Power Pivot helps to add the analytical capabilities and services of Microsoft Excel.

9. What is Power Query?

Power Query is a business intelligence tool by Microsoft for Excel. Power Query cleans, transforms, and reshapes data as per the requirements. With Power Query, you can write your query and run the program.

10. What are the components of Microsoft’s self-service BI solution?

Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) has two components Excel BI Toolkit and Power BI.

11. What is Self-Service BI?

(SSBI) Self-Service Business Intelligence is a big boost in business intelligence. SSBI empowers many business professionals with no technical or coding knowledge to use Power BI and develop reports and predict business growth. dashboards are easy and even can be handled by a nontechnical user, to help their business make more insightful agreements.

12. What is DAX?

DAX is Data Analysis Expressions. DAX is used as custom calculations for calculated columns. DAX is a collection of functions, operators, and frameworks used in excel formulas to calculate and return values. It generates new information from the existing set of data.

13. What are Filters in Power BI?

Filters are mathematical and logical conditions enforced on data to clear out essential information in rows and columns. The following are some of the filters in Power BI:

• Drillthrough filters
• Drillthrough filters
• URL filters–transient
• Pass-Through filters
• Manual filters
• Auto filters
• Include/Exclude filters
• Drill-down filters
• Cross Drill filters

14. What is Get Data in Power BI?

Get Data is an icon on Power BI used for importing data from the system.

15. What are the advantages of Power BI?

Some of the advantages of Power bi are:

• It develops interactive data visualization in data centers
• It allows users to convert data into visuals and share
• It creates relatability for Excel queries and dashboards for faster analysis
• It caters to quick and accurate solutions
  

16. What is Power BI Cloud?

• Power BI Cloud is a Cloud-Based Data Visualization set-up that permits the users to edit, view, create and share the dashboards’ reports & datasets in the company and a group of people by protecting the Admin Rights. Permission is required to view & edit reports & dashboards.

17. What are some of the refresh options available in Power BI

There are  four  types of refresh options in Power BI

• Import (data storage within Power BI)
• DirectQuery (data storage outside power BI)
  
• LiveConnection (data storage outside power BI)
• Composite

18. What are the different connectivity modes in Power BI?

The different connectivity modes in Power BI are;

• Import (data storage within Power BI)
• DirectQuery (data storage outside power BI)
• LiveConnection (data storage outside power BI)
• Composite

19. To which Data Source can Power BI connect?

Power BI can connect to many data sources, they are:
Excel, Jason, SQL server, Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase, Teradata, SAP HANA, Microsoft Azure SQL database, MS Azure marketplace, MS Azure HD insight, blob storage, Hadoop file, Sharepoint list.

20. How to calculate the average in Power BI?

• Calculate the average in Power BI in two ways:
  When we add a measure to a visual; by default, it compiles any measure. By clicking on the drop-down for the measure- we can change from Sum to Average. This process gives us the average.
  The second way is creating a calculated measure for the average by using the AVERAGE() DAX function.

21. What is KPI in Power BI?

(KPI) means Key Performance Indicators. These are the calculations that provide us with insights into our data and help us make a judgment based on them. These are the fields in which business decisions are made. Power BI has a pictorial representation of data called KPI, which helps to visualize these specific measures. This KPI visual shows the trend of the specific measure throughout the year and tracks the changes. 

22. How to Sort Data in Power BI?

There are various formats available for data sorting. In the data view, there is a common sorting option of alphabetical order. There is also an option of Sorting by column, where one can sort a column based on a different column. The sorting can be done in visual form as well. Sort by ascending and descending option by the fields and measure present in the image form is also available.

The versions of BI are:

• Power BI Desktop 
• Power BI service
• Mobile Power BI apps for iOS and Android devices

23. How to Publish a Dashboard in Power BI?

To publish a dashboard, first, make sure you sign in to a professional Power BI account. it only takes the work/ org account. When you are signed in, there is a publish option you can find, as you click the option it opens a small window- which asks you to select the workspace into which you want to publish your report. It is by default, you have the option of My Workspace, which is the space allocated for you. for you to publish your report.

24. What is MDX in Power BI?

MDX is an Analysis Services Tabular potential in Power BI that is used to help improve the user experience in Excel and many applications that use MDX query language against the tabular form of the models and Power BI datasets. To have a hands-on MDX, extend your datasets in Power BI and then connect with Excel by using analyze in Excel, the new Power BI Datasets within Excel feature,  Power BI Premium is also a good option to connect through the XMLA endpoint.

25. How will you change the data format in the Power BI Query editor?

Select the date column in the table
and go to the “Modelling” tab.
There is a “Date” formatting section,
From the drop-down menu select the date type as the date.

26. How are relationships defined in Power BI?

Relationships between tables are defined in two ways: 
Manually - Primary and foreign keys are used to define manually, the relationship between the tables.
Automatic - This is an automated feature of Power BI that automatically create and detects relationships between tables.

27. What is row-level security?

Row-level security sets limitations on the data a user can view and approach, and it depends on filters. Users can design the roles in Power BI Desktop and also publish them to Power BI Service to compose row-level security.

28. Where is data stored in Power BI?

Power BI gets support from the cloud platform to store the data. Power BI can use a desktop service. Microsoft Azure is used as the essential cloud service to store data.
Azure SQL Database
Azure Blob Storage

29. Why is general formatting applied to Power BI data?

By general formatting Power BI can easily categorize and identify data, making it considerably smooth to work with.

30. What are the different versions of Power BI?

The versions of BI are:

• Power BI Desktop 
• Power BI service
• Mobile Power BI apps for iOS and Android devices

31. What is the Lock aspect in Power BI?

Lock Aspect is used to lock the proportion of a visual when you drag through the corners to resize it. For instance, after creating a visualization chart & turning the Lock Aspect on – and then attempting to resize, it won’t change, and it will keep the proportions like before.

32. What are the critical components of the Power BI toolkit?

The critical components of Power BI are listed below.

• Power Query
• Power Pivot
• Power View
• Power Map
• Power Q&A

33. What is the content pack?

A content pack is a built-in collection of visualizations and Power BI reports using your chosen service. The content pack is used when you do not wish to create the report from the start.34. How to combine two columns in Power BI?

34. To combine two columns in Power BI, With the help of DAX expression select the new calculated column.

For example, The DAX Expression will help you if you need to add the values of two columns & make the third column, 

Total=Sheet Name(Col1) +sheet Name(Col2). 

35. What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot is a dedicated data modeling fundamental that allows for highly compressed data storage along with super fast calculations. 
Excel also has this feature and can also construct a data model in a spreadsheet. 
It is similar to the SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) tabular format, which resembles the Power Pivot’s server version. 
The Excel interface creates the data visualization report. The Power View is an interactive visualization application that allows users to rapidly and simply build a data visualization.

36. What is the difference between Power Query & Power Pivot?

• Power Query: It is mostly about data analysis.
• Power Query is an ETL service tool
• Power Pivot: It is mostly about collection and data transformation.
• Power Pivot is an in-memory data modeling component.

37. What are the drawbacks of Power BI?

Some limitations to using Power BI are as follows:
Power BI does not accept file sizes larger than 1 GB and does not blend the imported data accessed from real-time connections.
The user's login id must match the email id to share dashboards and reports. 
The dashboard is very particular about the user login or authority. Do not permit or pass other users or different entity parameters.
There are limited data sources that permit real-time connections to Power BI reports and dashboards.

38. How to connect JIRA to Power BI?

With the help of JIRA content packs and JIRA Rest API, we can connect to JIRA. There are a few steps involved.
To connect JIRA to Power BI, we need an API token.
Download and install the Jira content pack. Then add the API token to the Jira content pack.
After the connection, a workspace is automatically created by the dashboard, and a set of reports to analyze the data visually.

39. What is OData feed in Power BI?

OData stands for open data protocol. It is usually used to pluck data from websites and SharePoint. It helps to extract data from a URL without getting into the details of URL-specific parameters like request, response, HTTP methods, etc. The back end takes care of these things, leaving us to focus on extracting the data and making changes, and creating useful analyses.

40. What are the different types of Data refresh options available in Power BI?

The Power BI has four different ways to refresh the data of the published reports(Package Refresh, Tile refresh, Visual Container Refresh, and Model Refresh). 
Package Refresh: It refreshes the report by updating the data from one drive. It refreshes the data from the cloud location and not from the data source.