Get started building with Power BI

 Introduction        

             Microsoft Power BI is a collection of apps, software services and connectors that come together to turn unrelated data into visually impressive and interactive insights. Power BI can work with simple data sources like Microsoft Excel and complicated ones like cloud-based or on-premises hybrid Data warehouses. Power BI has the capabilities to easily connect to your data sources, visualise and share and publish your findings with anyone and everyone.

        Power BI is simple and fast enough to connect to an Excel workbook or a local database. It can also be robust and enterprise-grade, ready for extensive modeling and real time analytics. This means it can be used in a variety of environments from a personal report and visualisation tool to the analytics and decision engine behind group projects, divisions, or entire corporations.

        As Power BI is a Microsoft product and has built in connections to Excel, there are many functions that will be familiar to an Excel user.

   Download Power BI Desktop

You can download Power BI Desktop from the web or as an app from the Microsoft Store on the Windows tab.

https://aka.ms/pbidesktopstore

Building blocks of Power BI

        Everything you do in Microsoft Power BI can be broken down into a few basic building blocks. After you understand these building blocks, you can expand on each of them and begin creating elaborate and complex reports. After all, even seemingly complex things are built from basic building blocks. For example, buildings are created with wood, steel, concrete and glass, and cars are made from metal, fabric, and rubber. Of course, buildings and cars can also be basic or elaborate, depending on how those basic building blocks are arranged.

Let's take a look at these basic building blocks, discuss some simple things that can be built with them, and then get a glimpse into how complex things can also be created.

Here are the basic building blocks in Power BI:

Visualizations:

A visualization (sometimes also referred to as a visual) is a visual representation of data, like a chart, a color-coded map, or other interesting things you can create to represent your data visually. Power BI has all sorts of visualization types, and more are coming all the time. The following image shows a collection of different visualizations that were created in Power BI.

Datasets:

Datasets can also be a combination of many different sources, which you can filter and combine to provide a unique collection of data (a dataset) for use in Power BI.

For example, you can create a dataset from three database fields, one website table, an Excel table, and online results of an email marketing campaign. That unique combination is still considered a single dataset, even though it was pulled together from many different sources.

Reports:

In Power BI, a report is a collection of visualizations that appear together on one or more pages. Just like any other report you might create for a sales presentation or write for a school assignment, a report in Power BI is a collection of items that are related to each other. Reports let you create many visualizations, on multiple pages if necessary, and let you arrange those visualizations in whatever way best tells your story.

Dashboards:

A dashboard must fit on a single page, often called a canvas (the canvas is the blank backdrop in Power BI Desktop or the service, where you put visualizations). Think of it like the canvas that an artist or painter uses—a workspace where you create, combine, and rework interesting and compelling visuals. You can share dashboards with other users or groups, who can then interact with your dashboards when they're in the Power BI service or on their mobile device.

Power BI components

Power BI consists of a collection of apps and can be used either on desktop, as a SaaS product or on a mobile device. Power BI Desktop is the on-premises version, Power BI Service is the cloud-based offering and mobile Power BI runs on mobile devices.

The different components of Power BI are meant to let users create and share business insights in a way that fits with their role.

Included within Power BI are several components that help users create and share data reports.

Power Query: a data mashup and transformation tool

Power Pivot: a memory tabular data modeling tool

Power View: a data visualization tool

Power Map: a 3D geospatial data visualization tool

Power Q&A: A natural language question and answering engine

        Additionally, there are dozens of data sources that connect into Power BI, ranging from files (Excel, PDF, SharePoint Folder, XML), databases (SQL Server Database, Oracle Database, IBM databases, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery), other Power BI data sets, Azure data connections and many online services (Dynamics 365, Salesforce Reports, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Facebook and others).

How to use Power BI

Power BI Desktop is where analysts and other users can create data connections, data models and reports. The Power BI service is where those reports can be shared, so other users can view and interact with the reports.

Building a Power BI report begins by connecting data sources. Users then query the data to create reports based on their needs. The report is published to Power BI Service and shared so cloud and mobile users can see and interact with the report. Permissions can be added to give colleagues the ability to edit reports or create dashboards or limit their ability to edit.