Power BI Basics

Recently took an online course on Power BI, and just want to share some key tips with everyone here.

3 Areas of Power BI

• Power BI Service (Online in-browser version to create visualizations, can hold and publish reports and dashboards)
• Power BI Desktop (Offline version to create visualizations)
• Power BI Mobile (for viewing on mobile devices)

Power BI Service

There are four sections in the Power BI service that we should be well versed in: Dashboards, Reports, Workbooks, and Datasets

Here’s a quick tip: ‘Quick Insights’ is a fast and easy way to auto populate some charts

Power BI Desktop: Getting Data

1. Import/connect data sources e.g. Excel, SQL Server, CSV etc
2. (Optional) Use ‘Refresh Data’ to update the data from original sources
3. ‘Transform Data’ to clean data, append data, merge data

Power Query Editor is where you transform the data

After importing data, ‘data profiling’ is a neat way to verify it

Power BI Desktop: Modeling Data for Analysis

• “Measures” perform real-time calculations based on your interactions with data on your report
• Use “Quick measure” to quickly create a measure
• Drill up/down data charts with the arrows

The arrows are on the top right of the chart

• Use “Data” tab to categorize/format/hide fields, to get data ready for visualization

“Data” tab is at the left

• Here are some useful tools

Slicers, tool-tips, drill-through

Power BI Mobile

Power BI Mobile is just the iOS and Android app to connect and interact with your data and dashboards in the cloud. Quite straightforward.

That’s all! hopefully this helps in your manipulating and interacting with your datasets. Have fun!