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 - a free desktop application for building and

designing reports.
2. Power BI Service - the online publishing service for viewing and
sharing reports and dashboards.
3. Power BI mobile apps - for viewing reports and dashboards on the
go.

What is Power BI Used For?

The purpose of BI is to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and uncover
insights in business data 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

Windows and MacOS.
2. Pricing options differ between Power BI and Tableau. However,
Tableau is generally the more expensive option.
 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
Now, let's get our hands dirty and work with our data in Power BI.

Data sources and connections

Power BI offers a wide variety of supported data sources and connections,

making it incredibly easy to connect to the data source of your choosing. For
this tutorial, we will import some sample financial data provided by
Microsoft.
 Importing data
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. Transforming your
data before loading it in can be advantageous, as there are often small
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 we have no

transformation steps 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 example below, we have included an additional table
called Products containing some fictitious product categories to demonstrate
data modeling later in this tutorial. You can add this table by selecting Enter
Data in the ribbon.
Lastly, select Close & Apply from the ribbon to start building and designing
the report.

Building and Designing Power BI Reports

We are ready to build our first report.

Data model view

Now that we have imported two data tables, we can create relationships
between them using the data model view.
 There are two ways you can create a relationship in Power BI:

1. Select a field from a 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 we will discuss 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 offers two interesting options for defining a relationship:

cardinality and cross-filter direction. The choices for each option can have a
big impact on the resulting report, so choose carefully. Let's break down
each of these options:
Cardinality has four 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 one of the tables. Our data shows 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 three 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, KPIs, 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 your desired visual 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.

It is recommended that you only download custom visuals from Microsoft

AppSource, as they have been tested and approved by Microsoft.
Downloading them from anywhere else on the internet can have unintended
effects or even be harmful.
In this tutorial, we build a simple report that contains these visuals: slicers,
clustered bar charts, a line chart, and a KPI. We will review 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 will add some
conditional formatting to make that negative value 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. 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 be
published 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, which you will see 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 created
from this data in the 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 were 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 to 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 include adding a comment or exporting the data to 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.

Conclusion
Power BI is a powerful tool for transforming data into actionable insights
through interactive dashboards and reports. Whether you're just getting
started or looking to deepen your expertise, learning Power BI is a valuable
step for anyone in data analytics or business intelligence.