Explore Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop allows us to build reports and share it across it makes sense when you explore it hands on,The first step in Power BI is to learn about the UI(User Interface) launch it and explore it.

Launch Power BI Desktop

To launch Power BI desktop click on Power BI Desktop app and launch it is launched you can see a welcome window which as report view data view and model view,and at the top you have all the options which you can use while creating your reports.Following image shows the different panes available in Power BI Desktop.

Creating a visual

You can create a visual in Power BI Desktop by selceting the  required column from the field pane as shown in the below image.

Publish Report

After creating report with the visuals we need to publish the report to Power BI Service to publish the report we have a publish report option in Power BI Desktop we need to login into Power BI service before publishing the report the following is the icon for publishing the report in Power BI Service.

Connect to data sources

Power BI connect to various data resources such as excel,Sql server,Microsoft Sql,Azure,worlsheets,text files and many more,you can gather the data from all the resources which mau not be filtered we can filter or transform the data in Power BI and then build the report and publish them,we can apply slicers and also include locations in map and may more following shows how to import data from excel Get data>Excel workbook>load the data will appear in the data view as shown in the following image.

Transform Data

On the center pane, right-clicking a column displays the available transformations. Examples of the available transformations include removing a column from the table, duplicating the column under a new name, or replacing values. From this menu, you can also split text columns into multiples by common delimiters.

Combining data from multiple sources

With Power BI Desktop, you can use the Power Query Editor tool to combine data from multiple sources into a single report you can combine data from different sources by using Query Editor.

Clean the data to include in report

While Power BI can import your data from almost any source, its visualization and modeling tools work best with columnar data. Sometimes, your data won't be formatted in simple columns, which is often the case with Excel spreadsheets.

Format data

You might need to format data so that Power BI can properly categorize and identify that data. With some transformations, you'll cleanse data into a dataset that you can use in Power BI. Examples of powerful transformations include promoting rows into headers, using Fill to replace null values, and Unpivot Columns.

Conclusion

Learnt know how to get data into Power BI Desktop and how to shape or transform that data so we can create compelling visuals.