Hi Learners,
Today, I’ll explain you how to use Power BI tools for data analysis and creating a dashboard report through step-by-step example.
First, I’ll give a brief overview about Power BI tools.
Step -1: Introduction of Power BI
What is Power BI?
In simple terms, Power BI is a business intelligence tools developed by Microsoft. Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to load your data from various sources, analysis and visualise your data into immersive way, and provide interactive insights from your data. You can load data from various sources like Excel spreadsheet, SQL databases, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses.
Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, clean and transfer data, and model your data without affecting the underlying source, visualize (or analysis) what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want as per below picture.
Types of Power BI app
Power BI Desktop is a Microsoft Windows desktop application,
Power BI service is an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service, and
Mobile Power BI apps that are available on phones and tablets.
Pictures of Power BI apps
Main Concepts of Power BI
· Capacities are a core Power BI concept which representing a set of resources used to host and deliver Power BI content. Capacities are two types; either shared or dedicated.
o Shared capacity is shared with other Microsoft customers.
o Dedicated capacity is fully committed to a single customer. Remember dedicated capacities require a subscription. By default, workspaces are created on a shared capacity.
· Workspaces are containing for dashboards, reports, datasets, and dataflows in Power BI.
Two types of workspaces:
o My workspace is the personal workspace for any Power BI customers to work with own contents. You can share dashboards and reports from your My Workspace.
o Workspaces are used to collaborate and share content with colleagues. You can add colleagues to your workspaces and collaborate on dashboards, reports, and datasets.
Note: all workspace members need Power BI Pro licenses.
· Datasets is a collection of data that you want to import or connect into Power BI. Power BI lets you connect to and import all sorts of datasets and bring all of it together in ne place.
How you install Power BI?
Power BI desktop app can be installed from Microsoft site. Initially it can be installed free for practice and learning.
Step -2: Introduction of Power BI Desktop apps
When you open Power BI Desktop, it looks like below picture. Power BI have a main five areas:
1. Ribbon - Displays common tasks that are associated with reports and visualizations.
2. Report view, or canvas - Where visualizations are created and arranged.
1. The Data view allows you to view all of your data available in your report. This is an easy way to quickly check data types and validate data.
2. The Model view allows you to visually set the relationship between tables or elements. A relationship is where two or more tables are linked together because they contain related data. This enables users to run queries for related data across multiple tables.
3. Pages tab - Located along the bottom of the page, this area is where you would select or add a report page.
4. Visualizations pane - Where you can change visualizations, customize colors or axes, apply filters, drag fields, and more.
5. Fields pane - Where query elements and filters can be dragged onto the Report view or dragged to the Filters area of the Visualizations pane.
Step -3: Data loading in Power BI and Creating a Report
In step 3 I have loaded sample data which I was created in Excel workbook.
Process of loading data into Power BI
o For loading your data, click File then Get data, under Get data you can see Most Common sources of as per below pictures. In my example I loaded Excel data. Remember, you can load single sheet or multiple sheet into Power BI.
o After loading data, you can view your loaded data as below picture. For view the loaded data Just click on Data icon from left site. In right site pane under Fields will shows the data source Sheet1 including fields names by data type.
o How to Create a Dashboard/Report?
Process
To create a dashboard, you need to drag any chart icon as per your choice from Visualisations located on right site as below picture. In my example I created Bar chart, Stacked Chart and Column chart
as an example. You can create multiple charts or just one single chart on your dashboard. You need to select field Under Fields option from right site. In my sample
dashboard I put Sales Date, Year, Quarter on Axis. You can put any fields as per your choice. In my dashboard Top left Column Chart shows Actual Sales by Year, Top right Side Chart showing Actual Sales and Monthly Sales Target by Year, and bottom left chart represents Actual Sales by Quarter. These charts have a drill down options. For next level view (drill down) you need to click double option, for drill up click Up arrow option and filtering option have filtering the report as per. The drill/down, and filtering options look like below picture.
If you want to create more report just click sign, it will be opened blank page for create another data visualisation dashboard.
Note: There is lots of options for slicing and dicing your dashboard reports.
In my next tips I’ll explain how to create more attractive data visualisation report and dashboard. Keep in touch for my next Power BI tips.
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