Power BI Practice Exercises with Solutions for Beginners

If you want to learn data visualization and business analytics, Power BI is one of the best tools to start with. It’s powerful, user-friendly, and widely used by businesses to make data-driven decisions. But the best way to learn Power BI is by doing — and that means practicing real-world exercises. In this guide, we’ll explore some of the most useful Power BI practice exercises with solutions to help you build confidence and improve your skills.

Why Practice Exercises Matter in Power BI

Reading tutorials or watching videos is helpful, but without hands-on practice, your learning won’t stick. Power BI is a practical tool — you need to work with real data, create visuals, and solve business problems to truly understand it.

Here’s what practicing will help you achieve:

• Strengthen your understanding of Power BI concepts like data transformation, modeling, and visualization.

• Improve problem-solving skills with real-world scenarios.

• Learn how to create interactive dashboards and reports.

• Gain confidence for interviews, certifications, or workplace tasks.

Exercise 1: Importing and Cleaning Data

Goal: Learn how to load and prepare data for analysis.

Task:

• Download a sample CSV file (e.g., sales_data.csv) containing columns like Date, Product, Region, Units Sold, and Revenue.

• Import this file into Power BI Desktop.

• Remove duplicates, handle null values, and correct any data type errors.

Solution:

1. Open Power BI Desktop and click Get Data > CSV.

2. Browse and load your sales_data.csv.

3. Go to Power Query Editor to clean the data:

   • Use Remove Rows > Remove Duplicates.

   • Replace nulls using Transform > Replace Values or remove them entirely.

   • Check data types and change them if needed (e.g., Date, Text, Number).

4. Click Close & Apply to load the cleaned data into Power BI.

✅ What you learn: Data import, data cleaning, and basic transformations — essential first steps in any Power BI project.

Exercise 2: Creating a Simple Bar Chart

Goal: Visualize total revenue by product.

Task:

• Use the cleaned sales data to create a bar chart showing revenue for each product.

Solution:

1. In the Report view, click on the bar chart icon.

2. Drag Product to the Axis field and Revenue to the Values field.

3. Customize the chart:

   • Add a title: “Revenue by Product”

   • Sort descending to see top-selling products first.

✅ What you learn: Creating visualizations and understanding how to use fields effectively.

Exercise 3: Using DAX to Create a Calculated Column

Goal: Add a profit column based on revenue and cost.

Task:

• Assume you have a column Cost. Create a new column Profit = Revenue – Cost using DAX.

Solution:

1. Go to Modeling > New Column.

2. Write the following formula:

Profit = Sales[Revenue] – Sales[Cost]

1. Press Enter. A new column “Profit” will appear in your table.

✅ What you learn: Basics of DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), which is crucial for calculations in Power BI.

Exercise 4: Creating a KPI Card

Goal: Display total revenue as a single number on your dashboard.

Task:

• Create a KPI card showing total revenue and format it properly.

Solution:

1. Select the Card visualization.

2. Drag the Revenue field into the card.

3. Format the number as currency and rename the title to “Total Revenue”.

✅ What you learn: How to highlight key metrics for dashboards.

Exercise 5: Adding a Slicer for Interactivity

Goal: Filter data by region.

Task:

• Add a slicer to let users filter the dashboard by region.

Solution:

1. Click the Slicer visual icon.

2. Drag the Region into the slicer field.

3. Interact with the slicer — you’ll see all visuals update based on the region you select.

✅ What you learn: Adding interactivity, which is essential for creating user-friendly dashboards.

Exercise 6: Building a Sales Dashboard

Goal: Combine visuals to create a complete dashboard.

Task:

• Create a dashboard with:

  • Bar chart: Revenue by product

  • Line chart: Revenue trend over time

  • KPI card: Total revenue

  • Slicer: Region filter

Solution:

1. Use the visuals you created in previous exercises.

2. Add a Line Chart and place Date on the Axis and Revenue on Values.

3. Arrange all visuals neatly and use consistent colors.

4. Test interactivity — the slicer should update all visuals at once.

✅ What you learn: Dashboard design and combining multiple visuals for analysis.

Bonus Tip: Use Sample Data from Microsoft

If you don’t have your own data, Microsoft provides free sample datasets.

• Go to Power BI Desktop → Get Data > Web → use sample data links.

• Or download the popular Financials sample dataset from Microsoft’s website.

Practicing with real, structured data will help you work on more complex exercises like calculated measures, drill-through reports, and data modeling.

Final Thoughts

Learning Power BI becomes much easier when you practice consistently. These Power BI practice exercises with solutions are designed to take you from beginner to confident user step by step. Start with importing and cleaning data, move on to creating visuals, then learn DAX, interactivity, and dashboard building.

With regular practice, you’ll not only understand how Power BI works but also know how to solve real business problems with data — a valuable skill in today’s data-driven world.