7. Introduction to PowerBI
Aim: Introduction to PowerBI and Get started with PowerBI, Prepare data for analysis and Model data in Power BI.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want. Now let's get started with Power BI.
The flow of work in Power BI
One common workflow in Power BI begins by connecting to data sources in Power BI Desktop and building a report. You then publish that report from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI service and share it so business users in the Power BI service and on mobile devices can view and interact with the report.
Introduction to building blocks
For a Power BI business user, the five building blocks are visualizations, dashboards, reports, apps, and datasets. These are sometimes referred to as Power BI content. Content exists in workspaces. A typical workflow involves all of the building blocks: A Power BI designer (yellow in diagram below) collects data from datasets, brings it into Power BI for analysis, creates reports full of visualizations that highlight interesting facts and insights, pins visualizations from reports to dashboards, and shares the reports and dashboards with business users like you (black in diagram below). The designer shares them in the form of dashboards, reports, or apps.
At its most basic:
A visualization (or visual), is a type of chart built by Power BI designers. The visuals display the data from reports and datasets. Typically, designers build the visuals in Power BI Desktop.
- A dataset is a container of data. For example, it might be an Excel file from the World Health Organization. It could also be a company-owned database of customers or it might be a Salesforce file. Datasets are managed by designers.
- A dashboard is a single screen with interactive visuals, text, and graphics. A dashboard collects your most important metrics, on one screen, to tell a story or answer a question. The dashboard content comes from one or more reports and one or more datasets.
- A report is one or more pages of interactive visuals, text, and graphics that together make up a single report. Power BI bases a report on a single dataset. Often, the designer organizes report pages to address a central area of interest or answer a single question.
- An app is a way for designers to bundle and share related dashboards and reports together. Business users receive some apps automatically but can go search for other apps created by colleagues or by the community. For example,out-of-the-box apps are available for external services you may already use, like Google Analytics and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Datasets
A dataset is a collection of data that designers import or connect to and then use to build reports and dashboards. As a business user, you won’t interact directly with datasets, but it’s still nice to learn how they fit into the bigger picture.
Each dataset represents a single source of data. For example, the source could be an Excel workbook on OneDrive, an on-premises SQL Server Analysis Services tabular dataset, or a Salesforce dataset. Power BI supports many different data sources.
- loading the dataset in given available formats. and then select that data and load it.
2. You can view the dataset in tabular form by clicking the table icon and then you can modify them according to your need.
3. Preparing the data for analysis. Here you can select the below display option. like, Whole number, decimal number, time, text, True/False, etc…
4. view the data in model view by clicking the model icon. When you click on the model, you can see the table name and the column name of the table in the model section. and then you can also provide some additional information like a description of a particular column, synonyms, etc…
Hope You Like The Stuff. 😇
