Reddit mentions of Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016

Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI and Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016.

The Definitive Guide to Dax aka the Purple Book.

Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel aka the Orange Book.

And lastly, one I don't actually have as yet, but am itching to get:

Beginning DAX with Power BI: The SQL Pro's Guide to Better Business Intelligence

I don't have the direct link on hand. But edx.org has a free one that I found useful.

Edit: I purchased this book and it was incredibly helpful. Worth the purchase:

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Pivot-BI-Excel-2010-2016/dp/1615470395

Rob Collie and Bill Jelen's books basically cover the entire thing and are very approachable (they're basically written for Excel power users):

PowerPivot and PowerBI

PowerPivot Alchemy

Well; honestly; good luck.

Powerpivot / Power BI is a pretty new thing; it's undergone so much change in the last 2-3 years; I strongly doubt you'll find much as far as decent resources.

For Access:
http://www.crwsystems.mb.ca/ MIGHT be willing to recommend someone;

Red river teaches courses: http://me.rrc.mb.ca/catalogue/Course.aspx?RegionCode=PC&ProgCode=COMTP-NA&CourseCode=COMP-9048

If you honestly expect you can learn Access in an hour; just grab a decent book on whatever version you are stuck using; and go from there:
https://www.amazon.ca/Power-Pivot-BI-Excel-2010-2016/dp/1615470395
https://www.amazon.com/Access-2016-Bible-Michael-Alexander/dp/111908654X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481653678&sr=1-1&keywords=access+2016

Try our book? It's primarily about DAX and people have seemed to really like it over the years. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1615470395/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_bgT7CbMKF1V50

If you're interested in data, you don't necessarily need to go the full Data Science path to get started. The relatively new self-service Business Intelligence tools are incredibly empowering for entry level analysts because one person can now deliver solutions on par with multi-million dollar traditional BI projects. I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Pivot-BI-Excel-2010-2016/dp/1615470395

u/psykobunnyto, it sounds like you're looking to Power BI to offload operational reporting from your CRM. Lots of folks are doing that now, whereas traditionally BI folks have stuck to ad hoc or historical analysis. I've been doing LOTS of operational reporting. As Russo and Ferrari say in the latest edition of their Definitive Guide to DAX, development in DAX requires a solid grasp of theory. Googling or redditing answers will not be enough.

CRMs and other transactional databases are designed for logging transactions. Power BI needs to be optimized for reporting instead. So, when creating a reporting model for a CRM, don't recreate the relationships from the source. Instead, find your transactions, which are your fact tables. The lookup tables are then your dimensions. In this case, both User and Account are dimensions. The fact tables would be transaction tables, tables with dates and amounts on them. In CRMs, these are typically Sales tables and Service Calls tables.

CRM Data Model

The creator, owner, and specialist for the account may or may not be the same person who handles an individual transaction. What I would do is de-normalize your Account dimension (de-normalize here means to duplicate the user name in the Account dimension). Power BI dimensions are typically short and fat, with relatively few records and many columns. This enables transaction tables to stay tall and thin and perform quickly. You could bring in the names using Power Query or calc columns.

Creator Name = ^(// calculated column)LOOKUPVALUE (Users[Name],Users[User Id],Account[Creator])

Using the account table, then, you can view all transactions by creator, owner, specialist, or the user who actually handles the transaction. If you want the Account Creator, put the Account[Creator Name] on rows. If you are looking at transactional info, then put Users[Name] on rows.

For Power BI data modeling theory, I recommend two options.

• For those with a SQL background, I recommend Russo and Ferrari and SQLBI.com.
  
• For those with an Excel background, I recommend PowerPivotPro.com and Collie/Singh's book, The Excel User's Guide to DAX.