Wednesday, February 1, 2017

An Introduction to Power BI

Power BI software has a Desktop application, a web application and a mobile version. First il give an intro on the Desktop version, then will publish whats created using the desktop to the web app.

For data import you have many options. Excel and SQL data sources are mainly used by businesses.

If you choose SQL Server, then you will have to provide server details and authentication parameters. Also there are two data connectivity modes. They are Direct & Import. If you choose import the copy of the data source will be stored at Power BI, else it will directly query from db as the name implies.

The panes
In the Reports view there are two panes, namely Visualization & Fields pane. The fields pane shows the table and colum details associated with the Power BI project. So when you import from a data source the table information will be visible there. You can use the visualization pane to showcase the information in your table in chart formats and etc..


Views
There are three main views. They are Report, Data & Relationships. You can use each view update the data set. The relationship view allows you to add relationships between the data tables.



Once you are done doing the visualizations hit Publish button in the Home tabs menu. Then the project gets published to the web.


In the web site you can generate quick insights for the project. Click on the three dots which appear on your data set (in this example it's 'Sales by country'). then Power BI starts generating the insights. The result will be something similar to below.


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