How to use Microsoft Power BI - Tutorial for Beginners
This is going to be a high-level overview of Power BI, more of a 101 or introduction. Downloading
Power BI Desktop is entirely free. You don't need an enterprise account or commercial account.
The benefit of installing through the Microsoft Store is anytime Power BI updates, you automatically
get those updates. Anytime any of the components change, the Microsoft Store will only download
the pieces that change. The most important thing you could do to get started is to get data. Th is
does not go through the Microsoft Store. Instead, you could download an executable and then you
could install it on your own. Once you finish installing Power BI, let's go ahead and launch it. I also
recommend pinning it to your taskbar for quick access in the future. An example of a simple
example from an Excel spreadsheet shows revenue, cost and profit data. The data is in Excel, but
this could also be in a Kusto query that I run to get this output. So just think of this as some data
that I'm getting and it just happens to be an Excel Excel spreadsheet just for simplification and also
so you could follow along as well.
In Kevin's company financials, there is a table on my desktop that contains data about the company.
I want to transform this data first before bringing it into Power BI. This opens up the Power Query
editor where I'll be able to modify my data and select what data I want in. First, I'll click on the unit
sold column. I'll right-click on it and then click on change type. Next, I'll filter my table down to only
the countries I care about. I'll give it a name that makes more sense. Now this is really cool that if
you find the table on some website you can pull that in as a data source.
Power BI drops us on a blank canvas. This is the canvas where we're going to create all of our visuals.
All of the data that we have and that we could build visuals off of. Over on the right-hand side,
these are all of the fields. Right to the left of that is another pane called Visuals. The default view
that we drop in is the Report View. This is where we 're going to build all of our visuals. Beneath
that you have another option for Data, and if I click on that you 'll see the yellow indicates the view
that I 'm in. Then over on the left-hand side, there 's a third option called Model. These are all of
my different relationships between my data. The next thing that I want to do i s to create a view of
all of the geographies where we have locations and I also want to see the profit by those
geographies. To do that, first off I'm going to click on Country. North America, Canada and France
all had about the same amount of profit. Germany and Mexico are smaller dots indicating that there
was less profit there.
The next thing I want to do is insert a table that will show me the population and then the units
sold for that population. I can switch it to a tree map and here I can see profit by country this way
as well. Here you see a simple bar chart that I inserted and it shows all of the product names and
the associated profit for each of those products. Fortune cookies generated the least amount of
profit in fortune cookies. Fortune cookies were the most profitable product in the United States.
Fortune cookie sales were the least profitable cookies. CNN.com: "I have a whole bunch of really
valuable information in this report now. I want to show you how you can change the look and feel
of it. With these different tools that you have under the format tool, you could go ahead and get
the visuals to match your company or your business brand and look and feel. Feel free to play
around with it and get it to how you want it to look. To share the r eport with others, first we need
to publish it, so let's go up to the file menu. We're going down to publish and then we're going to
publish to power bi."
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