DTA102/BID102 – BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND DATA

ANALYTICS LAB 2
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 should 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.

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

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.
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.

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.
• 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:

Clock on the New Measure icon at the top and create this measure.

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. You can
even design your own visuals if you have the 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.
Data

Publishing a report also publishes the data and you will see this separately in your workspace.
You can use this data to create new reports from the Power BI Service. Whenever you republish
a report, the data will be overwritten, so watch out for any changes to the data that could break
the reports that are created from this data in Power BI Service.

Select the data and you will be brought to a screen where you can see an overview of all the
reports that are built using this dataset. From this screen, you can also create a report using this
data or share this data with others. If you have a Power BI Gateway set up, you can also refresh
the data either manually or on a schedule.

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.
Dashboard

You can pin entire reports or individual visuals to dashboards. The biggest benefit of using
dashboards is that they allow you to pin visuals from different reports in your workspace. This
way, you can easily keep track of important metrics in one place rather than clicking on each
report to see them.