What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence tool that allows you to connect to various data sources,
visualize the data in reports and dashboards, and then share them with anyone you want.

Power BI is made up of 3 main elements:

1. Power BI Desktop
2. Power BI Service
3. Power BI mobile apps

Our main focus will be on Power BI Desktop - a free desktop application for building
and designing reports.

What is Power BI Used For?

Power BI is a tool in the category of Business Intelligence (BI). The purpose of BI is to track
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and uncover insights in business data so as to better
inform decision-making across the organization.

Power BI is used in different ways depending on the role of the individual, from developers,
analysts, managers, and directors, to everyone in between.

How Does Power BI Compare to Other Tools Like

Tableau and Excel?
Power BI and Tableau are both business intelligence tools and have a lot of overlap in terms
of their capabilities. There are 2 key differences between Power BI and Tableau:

1. Power BI only works on Windows, whereas Tableau supports both Windows and
MacOS.
2. Pricing options differ between Power BI and Tableau. However, Tableau is generally
the more expensive option.

Excel is a spreadsheet software and while it does contain much of the same core
functionality as Power BI, it has limited visualization options and lacks the ability to refresh,
share, and view reports and dashboards online.
Downloading and Installing Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is one of the core elements of Power BI and it is the main application for
designing and building reports.

It is recommended to download Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store as there are a
few advantages:

● Windows will automatically update your Power BI Desktop with the latest version.
Since Microsoft releases updates for Power BI every month, this can be a big
time-saver.
● Rather than needing to download the entire application for each update, Windows will
only download the components that changed in the update. This makes updates
faster and is useful if you are trying to minimize your data usage.
● You are not required to have admin privileges on your computer to install or update
Power BI Desktop (as is often the case with company-provided computers). This also
speeds up the monthly update process since you won't need to contact your IT
department every time you need to update the application.

If you need to download the Power BI Desktop application directly then head over to the
product page and select 'See download or language options'. This will take you to the
Microsoft Download Center where you can download the latest version of the application.

Keep in mind that you cannot have both the Microsoft Store version and the version from the
download center installed on your computer at the same time. If you do need to switch, then
be sure to first uninstall your current version of the application before installing the next.
Starting with Power Bi

When you launch the application, Power BI will start with a blank report. Let's go over the
components of the Power BI Desktop:

● Ribbon - the top ribbon contains most of the controls and options needed for building
the report.
● Views - this is made up of the report view, the data view, and the model view.
● Canvas - this is the main design area where visualizations and other elements are
added.
● Page selector - for navigation to other pages in the report.
● Filters - fields can be added here to filter the data.
● Visualizations - this contains the list of available visualizations.
● Fields - this section contains the tables and fields that are available in the data
model.
Importing and Transforming Data in Power BI Desktop
Data Sources and Connections

Power BI offers a plethora of supported data sources and connections. This makes it
incredibly easy to connect to the data source of your choosing. For this tutorial, we will be
importing some sample financial data provided by Microsoft to learn more about Power BI.
Importing Data

As stated at the beginning of the tutorial, you can download the sample data and import it by
selecting the Excel data source.

A preview window will pop up where you can select the table or sheet you want to import
from the Excel file. Tables and sheets are designated by their respective icons. It is generally
better to import tables as they are neatly defined in Excel with strict headers and row
boundaries.

Here you can also choose whether to load the data directly or go straight to the Power Query
Editor using the Transform Data option. Choosing to first transform your data before loading
it in can be advantageous as there are often little errors and issues that you may want to iron
out first. Select Transform Data and a separate window will open up for the Power Query
Editor.
 Transform Data
Power Query

The Power Query Editor can be broken up into 4 main parts:

● Ribbon - the top ribbon contains almost all of the data transformation options you
need to shape your data. We will explore a few common transformations below.
● Queries - this lists all the queries you have set up for this report. For complex reports,
you can organize queries into groups for better navigation and management.
● Data view - this is the main table containing the data for the selected query as well as
a formula bar. A preview of the data is shown with only the first 1000 rows.
● Transformation steps - the right-hand pane contains each of the transformation steps
that have been applied to the selected query. This allows you to keep track of each
individual change that has been made to the data. You can insert, delete, and move
steps around as needed.

Here, the financial sample data is already very clean so there are no transformation steps for
us to apply. However, these are some of the most common transformation steps:

● Removing rows and/or columns - some Excel data can have a lot of blank rows
and/or columns inserted for readability and aesthetic purposes, but these are not
useful in Power BI and should be removed.
● Changing data types - data types such as number, date, or text should be specified
for each column. Power BI will try to automatically detect the data type, yet it can
sometimes be wrong or there can be errors so it is a good idea to always
double-check the data types.
 ● Combining data with merge and append - similar to join and concatenate in SQL,
these transformations allow you to combine queries from multiple sources.
● Pivot and unpivot - these options allow you to transform your data from a wide to a
long format and vice versa. The unpivot option is particularly useful when dealing
with Excel files that have information (such as dates) running across the columns of a
table rather than as rows.
● Adding a conditional column - this is a useful transformation that allows you to add a
column based on if/then/else logic.

In the below example, we have included an additional table called “products”, containing
some fictitious product categories so that data modeling can be demonstrated later in this
tutorial. You can add this table by selecting Enter Data in the ribbon.

Lastly, select Close & Apply from the ribbon to get started with building and designing the
report.
Building and Designing Power BI Reports
Data Model View

Now that we have imported these 2 data tables, we can create relationships between them
using the data model view.

There are 2 ways you can create a relationship in Power BI:

1. Select a field from 1 table and drag it onto the field in the second table with which you
want the relationship to form.
2. Select Manage Relationships from the ribbon and then select “New” to add a
relationship using the same window that we will be discussing next (except that it will
start as blank).
By default, Power BI will try to infer a relationship between tables - it doesn't always get this
right so you may wish to turn this feature off in the settings. To edit the relationship,
right-click the connecting line between them and select “Properties”.

This window has 2 interesting options to choose from when defining a relationship:
cardinality and cross filter direction. The choices for each of these options can have a big
impact on the resulting report, so choose carefully. Let's break down each of these options.

Cardinality has 4 choices: many to one, one to one, one to many, or many to many. When
creating relationships, it is recommended that the joining field contains unique values in at
least 1 of the tables. In our data, we have a relationship between the Financials table and
the Products table using the Product field. The Products table has unique values for the
Product field (each product only appears once in the table). However, the Financials table
can have each product showing up several times by date, country, segment, etc.
Cross filter direction gives a choice between single and both directions. Relationships flow
from the table with unique values to the table with many values. In our case, the relationship
flows from the Products table to the Financials table. This means that if the cross filter
direction is set to single, then the Financials table can be filtered by the product and product
category fields in the Products table, but the Products table cannot be filtered by using the
product field in the Financials table.

DAX

Calculations in Power BI are powered by formulas called DAX or Data Analysis Expressions.
DAX allows you to create new fields and even new tables in your model. You can perform 3
types of calculations in Power BI that use DAX formulas:

1. Calculated tables - these calculations will add an additional table to the report based
on a formula.
2. Calculated columns - these calculations will add an additional column to a table
based on a formula. These columns are treated like any other field in the table.
3. Measures - these calculations will add a summary or aggregated measure to a table
based on a formula.

In this report, we will create a single measure called 'Profit margin' with the following formula:

Profit margin = SUM(financials[Profit])/SUM(financials[ Sales])

Visualizations

There are a variety of visualizations available in Power BI—bar charts, line charts, pie
charts, tables, matrices, simple cards, KPI's, gauges, interactive maps, and much more. On
top of that, there are many formatting options that you can play around with too.

You can also import custom visualizations if the visual you want is not on the list. Simply click
the ellipsis and a window will pop up where you can browse all the available visuals -- this is
known as Microsoft AppSource. You can even design your own visuals if you have
programming experience.
In this tutorial, we build a simple report that contains these
visuals: slicers, clustered bar charts, a line chart, and a KPI. We will go over how the
clustered bar chart and the KPI are created, the others should be easy to replicate on your
own.
Clustered Bar Chart

To insert a clustered bar chart, select the icon in the visualization pane and a blank bar chart
visual will appear on the canvas. Drag the 'Segment' field to the Axis, and drag our new
measure 'Profit margin' to the Values. A title and all the axis headers are automatically
populated for us based on the fields we added to the visual.
Since the profit margin is negative for one of the segments, we are going to add some
conditional formatting to make that negative value clearly stand out. Select the formatting
icon at the top of the visualization pane and then go down to the “Bars” options. Here we can
change the colors of the bars. To apply conditional formatting, select the “fx” symbol and a
window will pop up where you can apply rules based on the value of any field. Here we
select the Profit margin field and specify that the color should be red if the number is less
than 0.
KPI Visual

To insert a KPI visual, select the icon in the visualization pane and a blank KPI visual will
appear on the canvas. This KPI will be based on the Profit margin measure that we created
earlier. Drag the “Profit margin” field to “Value”.
Next, we will add a target of 20% for the KPI. We could add the target by dragging a
measure field under the “Target value” (this is useful if the profit margin target is used in
other visuals) but we will instead select the formatting icon and enter the target value under
the “Gauge axis” section.
Publishing Reports to Power BI Service
Once you are happy with your report, you can publish it to your Power BI Workspace. To do
this you must sign in to Power BI and then select Publish from the ribbon. Select a
workspace and the report will publish to Power BI Service. Log in to your Power BI account
and navigate to the workspace where you published your report.
Export to PDF from Power BI Desktop

To create a PDF document from Power BI Desktop:

1. Navigate to File > Export > Export to PDF.

2. A progress notification will update you on the export status. This process
may take a few minutes depending on your hardware.

3. A PDF document will be generated, containing all visible pages from your
Power BI report. Note that hidden pages will not be exported.

The quality of the generated PDF is excellent.

Report

Go back to your workspace and now select the report. From here you can view and interact
with the report as well as do a few other useful things, such as:

● Export the report as an Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF file for your own data analysis or
presentation.
● Share the report with other people.
● Subscribe to the report so that you receive emails on a schedule or when the report
is refreshed.
Each visual also has a number of options:

● Pin the visual to a dashboard.

● Copy the visual as an image.
● View the filters or slicers that are affecting the visual.
● Open the visual in focus mode.
● Other options: such as adding a comment or exporting the data to either an Excel or
CSV file.