Learn Power BI to build real dashboards in three months
Three months at about an hour a day takes someone comfortable with Excel to building a clean data model and a dashboard people will actually use. Roughly 100 hours. Dragging charts onto a canvas takes a day. The real skills are data modelling and DAX, and that's where this path spends its time.
3 months · ~100 hours · a published dashboard on your own data, with a star-schema model and working DAX measures
1.Microsoft Learn — PL-300 learning path
Microsoft's free modules for the Power BI Data Analyst certification cover the whole workflow: getting data with Power Query, cleaning and shaping it, building a model, writing basic DAX, designing reports and publishing to the service. They're dry but complete, with downloadable lab files. Do every lab in Power BI Desktop, which is free. Desktop runs only on Windows; Mac users need a Windows virtual machine or a cloud PC.
Free; the optional PL-300 exam is ~$165
PL-300 on Microsoft Learn →2.SQLBI — Introducing DAX
Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari are the acknowledged authorities on DAX, and their free video course explains what Microsoft's modules gloss over: row context versus filter context, how CALCULATE actually works, and why your measure returns the wrong total. Watch it twice. When you're ready for more, their book The Definitive Guide to DAX is the reference every serious Power BI developer owns.
Free; the book is ~$50–60
Introducing DAX →3.Build one dashboard on real data
Take a messy dataset you actually care about — your team's sales exports, your budget, a public dataset from your city — and build it end to end. Clean it in Power Query, model it as a star schema with a proper date table, write every number as a measure, and design one page that answers three specific questions. Show it to someone who'll use it and fix what confuses them. Rebuild it once from scratch.
Free with Power BI Desktop; sharing in the cloud requires a Pro licence
Power BI documentation →If this doesn't fit you
If you're on a Mac with no access to Windows, or your company uses Tableau, learn Tableau instead: Tableau Public is free and cross-platform, and the concepts transfer. If you already know SQL well, compress step 1 into two weeks and spend the saved time on DAX.
Why this path
Most Power BI tutorials teach visuals, and most bad Power BI reports have a broken model underneath beautiful charts. Microsoft's free path covers the full workflow, SQLBI fixes the DAX misunderstandings that trip up nearly everyone, and building on your own data forces the modelling decisions tutorials make for you. The certification is optional; the dashboard someone actually uses is the credential.