Power BI Desktop + Copilot

No. The course assumes basic Excel — SUM, VLOOKUP and PivotTables — and nothing more. Day 1 starts with what Power BI Desktop, the Service and the Gateway each do, then goes straight into cleaning data in Power Query. If you have taken our Excel Intermediate or Advanced course, the star schema and DAX on Day 2 will already feel familiar and you will move faster. If you have not, you still finish Day 3 with a published dashboard. Day 2 is the steepest day of the three. You will not be writing tiered commission logic from a blank page — we build it together from a starter pattern, and you leave with the file.

Power BI Desktop is a free download from Microsoft, and everything you build on your own laptop — Power Query, the model, DAX, the report — costs nothing. It runs on 64-bit Windows 10 or Windows 11 only. There is no Mac version, and Microsoft has not announced one. A Mac can run it inside a Windows virtual machine, but that setup is yours to maintain and we do not support it in class. Tell us before you book and we can arrange a Windows machine for the three days.

In Power BI Desktop, Copilot builds and edits report pages from a prompt, writes and explains DAX in DAX query view — including measures you then add to the model — summarises your semantic model and drafts measure descriptions. In Power BI Service it also drafts report pages, creates summary and narrative visuals, and answers questions about a report in plain language. One limit matters for Day 1: Copilot does not sit inside the Power Query Editor in Power BI Desktop. Microsoft's native Copilot for Power Query lives in Dataflow Gen2 in the Service. So in this course you have Copilot draft the M in chat, then paste it into the Advanced Editor and refine the steps yourself. That is also why Day 1 spends time on a review checklist: Copilot is a fast first draft, and Microsoft documents where it goes wrong on exactly the Day 2 workload — variables, calculation groups and newer DAX functions — so checking it is a skill rather than a formality. One more thing to expect. Parts of Copilot are still preview: the DAX query view Copilot has to be switched on under Options and Preview features in Power BI Desktop, the Desktop Copilot settings pane is still labelled preview, and Microsoft changes what Copilot can do month to month. We teach the version that is live on the day of your class and tell you what has moved since the last intake.

Read this part before you book. Two separate licences are involved and neither comes with Power BI Desktop. Copilot first. A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licence on its own is not enough. Microsoft requires your organisation to hold a paid Fabric capacity — F2 or higher — or Power BI Premium P1 or higher, with the Copilot tenant setting switched on, and you need contributor access to at least one workspace on that capacity. Trial capacities do not count, and Premium Per User workspaces are not supported. Because Laos sits outside the United States and the EU data boundary, your admin must also switch on the setting that lets data sent to Azure OpenAI be processed outside your region — without it Copilot is off by default no matter what has been bought. One thing keeps the cost down, and it is worth knowing before you rule this out: only the workspace you point Copilot at has to sit on the capacity. Your reports and semantic models can stay in ordinary Pro workspaces. A company can buy the smallest paid capacity, put a single workspace on it, and use Copilot in Power BI Desktop against models published anywhere. Publishing and sharing next. Whoever builds and publishes needs Power BI Pro, whatever the capacity — that covers publishing into a shared workspace, sharing a report, distributing an app, and owning a scheduled refresh other people depend on. The leaders who only open the report need Pro as well, unless the workspace sits on Fabric F64 or larger, or on Premium, where they can read it on the free licence. A free licence still covers building in Power BI Desktop and saving to your own My Workspace, including a refresh schedule there, and installing the on-premises data gateway costs nothing. During the three days you work on our training accounts, so Copilot is there for every exercise. Back at the office, if your company has no Fabric capacity, you will write the DAX and the M yourself instead of prompting for it — everything else you learned still works, and the course deliberately teaches you to read, fix and validate the code rather than only to ask for it. Send us your company's Microsoft licence position before you book and we will tell you plainly what you would need.

Instruction is in Lao. Course materials, the Power BI interface, the function names and the error messages are in English — that is how the software ships, and reading them is part of the work. Copilot prompts are written in English as well: Microsoft supports Copilot in Power BI officially in English only, and prompts in other languages may or may not return a sensible answer. We teach the prompt patterns in Lao and you type them in English.

Tell us as early as you can. The three days stack: Day 2 models the data you shaped on Day 1, and Day 3 publishes the model you built on Day 2, so a missed day is harder to make up here than on our Excel courses. We send the exercise files and the finished .PBIX for that day, and the instructor runs a catch-up session before the next class day.

Excel Advanced does much of the same thinking inside a workbook: Power Query, a star schema in Power Pivot, DAX measures, a dashboard in a file that lives on your laptop and gets emailed around. This course leaves Excel. You build in Power BI Desktop, then publish to Power BI Service — workspaces, an app for leadership, a daily scheduled refresh through a gateway, a mobile layout, and Copilot inside Power BI itself. Take Excel Advanced if your reporting stays in Excel files. Take this one if leadership needs a live dashboard that refreshes itself. You do not have to take Excel Advanced first, but if you have, Day 2 will move quickly for you. The extra 100,000 LAK buys Day 3 — publishing, workspaces, apps, the gateway and scheduled refresh — and the platform that keeps your report running after you close your laptop.

The working .PBIX files from all three days, the Sales, Inventory, Target and Commission datasets, reusable Power Query scripts and DAX patterns, the Copilot prompt library we test in class along with the finished M and DAX for every exercise, executive dashboard templates, a step-by-step Power BI Service deployment guidebook, and a certificate of completion from ALL IN ONE STATION stating 24 hours. Everything you take home is yours to use and adapt inside your organisation. It is not licensed for resale or for teaching outside it. You can also message the instructor after the course ends.

The price shown is per participant. For a whole team booked in-house we quote per class — tell us your headcount and your dates and we send the figure in writing before you commit. The fee covers the instructor, the four datasets, the exercise files, all course materials, Copilot access on our training accounts for the three days, and the certificates. It does not cover any Microsoft licence your organisation buys to keep working this way afterwards. You provide the training room, a projector or large screen, one Windows laptop per participant, and stable internet — Copilot and the whole of Day 3 run in the cloud. Class size is capped, and the cap comes from our training capacity rather than from the room: every Copilot exercise runs against one Fabric capacity, and past a certain number the responses slow down for everyone. Ask us for the current number when you book. On running it with your own data: often, yes — but tell us early. The three days run on four datasets that carry through every workshop, so swapping in your own tables means rebuilding the pipeline, the model and the commission exercise around them. We need a sample and a scoping call at least three weeks before the course, we will say plainly which exercises we can rebuild on your data and which we cannot, and where the rebuild is substantial we quote it separately. The option that costs nothing: work the class exercises on our datasets and bring a copy of your own file to build alongside them — no notice needed for that. Either way bring a copy rather than the original, and remove any columns you are not allowed to share. One privacy point before you decide. What you send to Copilot — your prompts and your model structure — is processed by Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service, which for a capacity in this region runs outside the country. Day 1 covers what Copilot can and cannot see so you can make that judgement yourself. If your data cannot leave your organisation at all, do the Copilot exercises on our sample datasets and build your own file by hand.