Power BI Projects (PBIP) and Git Quick Start

Whiteboards are a great tool to gain shared understanding of a topic in a semi-formal way. Drawing along may also help with grokking the material!

Graph theory, oh my. But nodes and edges, or rather, simple circles and arrows, are enough to fuel our deep understanding of Git!

This one gets a bit messy, but is a complete discussion of how we use Git to collaborate with others to build something.

Not that it is needed, but here is some "justification" for using the GitHub Desktop GUI application over complicated command lines. DAGs really are the fundamental building blocks of Git!

Git and GitHub are different, albeit, related things. This whiteboard discussion starts to demonstrate this concept and how to work with both.

You would normally just clone your Power BI Project repository and begin working. But for this course, we must first "fork" it into our personal GitHub profiles.

Cloning is all about getting our Power BI Project setup and running locally.

Power BI Projects are currently a "preview" feature and need to be enabled before we can begin using them.

Branch early, branch often. Branches are a way to work "safely" and not have to worry about breaking the "main line," or production version of your PBIP.

We'll make our first changes right in Power BI Desktop, no different than we're used to doing. But, we'll review those changes, commit them, and push them into the cloud (GitHub shared repository) for safe keeping!

We'll briefly tour the Life Expectancy PBIP then grab a "ticket" for some maintenance work!

After meeting with stakeholders, we're not done yet. We have to make a couple of more tweaks!

We can switch to any branch and see what the PBIP looks like. In other words, we can switch back to the main branch and see the PBIP without our changes. But, unfortunately, we do have to close and reopen Power BI Desktop, for now at least.

We still have to update the x-axis. And we'll do it in Power BI Desktop. Then we'll review the changes in GitHub Desktop, provide a diary commit, and push those changes out to GitHub. RHYTHM ! ! !

PRs are a way to request your changes get into the main, or production version of your PBIP. They don't really have anything to do with the local repository, so we'll make the PR in GitHub from the browser.

You might not be the person to merge/accept PRs in your organization, but for this course you are. We'll accept and merge our PR into the main branch and discuss "squashing" commits. We'll also get the latest main branch to verify our changes are working.

A longer video, showing everything, all in one take. You will see some false starts, back-steps, and recovering from unexpected occurrences. Real world!

The power of Git allows us to go back to any version of our PBIP. We'll see how GitHub Desktop makes this easy. Don't forget, we have to close and reopen Power BI Desktop!

If you've made some changes, maybe inadvertently, you can easily discard them with GitHub Desktop. Knowing this gives you confidence to open a PBIP and just start hacking!

Locally (below the line) committed changes can be undone. However, once commits have been pushed to GitHub (above the line), it's best to use Revert.

We've used an already setup GitHub repository for this course, in this video, you'll see how to setup your own PBIP.

Quick review, some parting thoughts, and inspiration to start using your newfound skills.