From the course: Learning Power BI Desktop

What you need for this course - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Learning Power BI Desktop

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What you need for this course

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- [Instructor] Here's what you'll need to work along with me in this course. First, some hardware recommendations. Microsoft requires two gigabytes of available RAM, and four or more is recommended. If you're working with larger data models, then you will brush up against these limitations fairly quickly. Even though four gigabytes of available RAM is recommended, if you have eight or more gigabytes available, you will be much happier. You'll need a CPU of one gigahertz or faster, and Microsoft's recommendation now is a 64-bit processor. The display requirement is 1440 by 900 or 1600 by 900, if you're using a 16:9 display. This is important because Power BI desktop uses all this real estate, so if your resolution is set lower, for example, 1024 by 768, Power BI desktop will actually display some items off the edge of the screen where you can't see them. And there's nothing more frustrating than a dialogue box that you can't close because you can't even see it. If you've modified your display settings to increase the size of your text, for example, to 125 or 150%, that will cause the same type of problem. So if you need to change your display settings, you'll find them under Settings, System, Display in whatever version of Windows you're using. In terms of software, Power BI requires Windows 8.1 or higher. Windows 7 is no longer supported. And you will also need to have .NET 4.6.2. It's probably already installed on your computer, but if you get a message that it's not, simply install it, it's free. Technically, you can use Internet Explorer 11 or a later version of IE right now. However, Power BI will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 as of August 17th, 2021. So this is a great time for you to move up to a newer browser like Microsoft Edge Chromium, which I will be using in the course. Finally, you need Power BI Desktop, which is a free download from Microsoft. And I'll show you how to install and launch that later in the course if you have not installed it already. You also need to bring some skills and experience to this course. I assume, for example, that if we are using Excel, which we will do at the beginning of the course, you would already know how to enter, edit, and format numbers and text, use the format as table command, and the other tools that are available within a table, find and replace text and numbers, sort and filter data and insert and format visualizations, or as they're called in Excel, charts. If these are comfortable skills for you in Excel, that's great because these are exactly the skills you want to bring to Power BI Desktop. But if any of this looks unfamiliar and you'd like to brush up on your data skills now or at any time during the course, I highly recommend Managing and Analyzing Data in Excel. This course is for Excel 2019 or Excel for Office 365, but there are also versions of this course for Excel 2016 and 2013, and Power BI works with all of these versions of Excel. You'll find all three of these courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library. With our hardware, software, and skill settings in place, let's continue.

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