Power BI is a data visualization application that lets you connect, transform and find insights into the most pressing matters of your business. It helps in sourcing your data and creating visual dashboards, KPIs, and reports by editing the data as per your concerns. You can collaborate, share and integrate your data easily across products documentations. It also has a wide range of visualizations, including charts, tables, and maps, and allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports. Power BI is widely used for data analysis, reporting, and business intelligence. With a cut-down risk of the misgovernment of data, including when data is exported out of your application, it proves worthy of use. Power BI is compelling in the case of compressing the data with millions and billions of rows.
Use of Power BI
It is mainly used to create visualized reports and dashboards through which you can learn more about your data. Uploading your report to the Power BI service enables you and your users to interact and track the report being used. Here, we will go through the steps required for you to create and edit Reports and Dashboards.
Basic Steps Required:
1. Extract the data
2. Transform the data as required and change the relationship between the tables using a power query.
3. Use DAX to perform the calculation on your data.
4. After getting your data ready, you can jump to your visualizations.
5. Add the graphs, charts, cards, etc., and create edits within them to make your report look more understandable.
6. Upload your dashboard to the cloud enabling your colleagues to access the dashboard and report.
Loading data
Let’s start with how you can load data in your application. You can load your data from the ‘Get data’ option in the home tab. You can select from the following options:
- Files: Power BI can import statistics from Excel, CSV, and other record formats.
- Databases: It can connect to several databases, which include MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server.
- Direct Query: It can retrieve the desired dataset by connecting to a data source without importing it beforehand.
- Online Services: It can connect to various online services for example Google Analytics, SalesForce, and SharePoint.
- Live Connection: An up-to-date live connection with a data source in real-time allows users to retrieve up-to-date data.
After the data gets loaded into the application, you can begin transforming and modeling your data. You can select add new column option with custom options, and make your own calculated field column.
Step 1: For this step Select “Data” from the three options on the left margin.
Step 2: Select “New Measure” from the “Calculation” section in the “Table Tools” tab.
Step 3: Now you can get your desired functions with the table field’s name and thus you’ll be able to create a new column.
Step 4: After this step, you’ll complete your required columns or measures. You should use the “New Column” method when you require this column to be present at data refreshes as well because it gets defined in the table. Whereas measure works as a filter on your table and it is faster because they are not stored in the memory. Power BI has a built-in Power Query Editor that makes your data visuals-ready. It allows you to make advanced changes to clean your data for perfect visualizations and get your model done.
Note: Reports in Power BI use only a single dataset whereas dashboards use many datasets.
Power Query
Power Query is used to transform data by performing tasks such as filtering, grouping, and pivoting. It helps to create calculated columns and measures by using the formula bar and functions. After the cleaning and transformation of your data, you can move on to your visualizations. Following are the steps to use Power Query.
Step 1: Select “Home” from the top menu.
Step 2: From the queries section select “Transform data”.[(A new window will open with Power Query Editor),(If no data connection is made yet then it’d show a blank page)].
Step 3: On this page you’ll get to add, change, view, transform, and correct your data.
- The “Home” tab provides data source options.
- The “Transform” tab includes addition, deletion, splitting, and changing data types functions.
- The “Add Column” tab provides the column addition and formatting of the same.
- The “View” tab provides how the page is displayed to you.
Step 4: With a right-click on your column you can make different changes.
Step 5: After making the necessary transformations, click on “Close & Apply” by clicking on the “File” tab to save the changes and return to the Power BI Desktop.
Your data is now ready to be used in visualizations and reports.
Note: If you want to make more complex changes to your visualizations, you can use the “DAX” formulas to create calculated columns and measures.
Visualization in Power BI
Format and Fields sidebar is the section to make your dashboard and report visually attractive.
- To edit the layout of a report, use the “Layout” option under the “View” tab. (It provides various theme options to match up with your report.)
- To edit the visualization after it’s been added to the report, click on the visualization and use the “Format” option to customize the visualization.
If you want to make more complex changes to your visualizations, you can use the “DAX” formulas to create calculated columns and measures.
Dashboards in Power BI
A dashboard in Power BI is a collection of visualizations and reports that provide an overview of key metrics and data for a specific area of interest. It allows users to view, analyze, and share data in a visually appealing way. It consists of a single page.
It allows the user to make changes in the visualizations i.e. involvement by the end user as well rather than a simple summary of the data.
Note: Dashboards are only provided in the Power BI Service and not in Power BI Desktop or Mobile.
Types of Reports in Power BI
Reports can be shared and accessed by others inside an organization and embedded in websites, portals, and apps. Users can also engage with the visualizations in a file to discover the statistics and explore new insights.
Reports are something that can consist of only one visual/number of visuals or one page/number of pages as per the requirement of your job.
- To create a new report, you can select the “New Report” button in the Home tab of the Power BI Desktop.
- Once you have created a report, you can add different visualizations such as charts, tables, and maps by dragging fields from your data source onto the report canvas.
- You can also edit the appearance of these visualizations by adjusting their formatting options. (figure above)
- To edit an existing report, you can simply open it and make the necessary changes.
- You can also make a copy of an existing report, by right-clicking on the report in the Power BI Service and selecting ‘Duplicate Report’
These are the reports that you should be acquainted with:
- Canvas report: This is the most basic type of report in Power BI. It allows users to drag and drop visualizations onto a canvas and arrange them as desired.
- Paginated report: This type of report is similar to a traditional paper report, with a fixed layout and the ability to add tables, matrices, and charts.
- Dashboard: A Power BI dashboard is a collection of visualizations and other elements that can be shared with others.
- Data Story: A data story tells a story with the data through a collection of multiple pages.
- Interactive visualizations: Interactive visualizations such as maps, cards, and gauges are used to create engaging and interactive reports.
- KPI report: A KPI report is a type of report that allows you to track key performance indicators and measure the performance of your business.
- Mobile report: A mobile report is an optimized report for viewing on mobile devices. It is designed to provide a great user experience on mobile devices.
- Drillthrough report: A drill-through report allows users to drill down into the data to view more detailed information.
These are some of the most commonplace types of reports that are created in Power BI, however, there are different styles of words that can be created as well.
Conclusion
- Load the data from your desired data source.
- Clean the data in excel and load the data.
- Change the relationship and add-remove columns from the table as required.
- Create measures and calculated fields to complete your dataset and move on with the visuals.
- Add the visuals and edit them as per your requirement from the visualizations panel to create your report.