Introduction to Power BI

Introduction

The business world is increasingly data driven. Small and large businesses alike use data to make decisions about sales, hiring, goals, and all areas for which they have data. While most businesses have access to data of one type or another, it can be intimidating to try to understand without a background in data analytics or statistics. Even if you do understand the data, a challenge may arise in displaying the data in an easy to understand way and communicating it to other relevant people. Power BI takes the intimidation and hassle out of data analysis and visualization. By connecting to one or more of the hundreds of existing data sources and using a secure, easy to understand interface, you can quickly and simply interact with and understand your data to influence all business systems.

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Whether your data is a simple Microsoft Excel workbook, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses, Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, clean, and model your data without affecting the underlying source, visualize (or discover) what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

These three elements:-

 Desktop, the Service, and Mobile apps - are the backbone of the Power BI system and lets users create, share and consume the actionable insights in the most effective way.

        The use of Power BI could depend on the role that you are in. For example: if you are the stakeholder of a project, then you might want to use Power BI Service or the Mobile app to have a glance at how the business is performing. But on the other hand, if you are a developer, you would be using Power BI Desktop extensively to publish Power BI desktop reports to the Power BI Service.

Power BI Flow:-

    Generally, the flow starts at the Power BI Desktop, where a report is created. This created report can be published to the Power BI Service and finally shared so that the users can use it from the Mobile apps.

    This is the most common approach for sharing reports. There are other approaches but we will stick to this flow for this entire tutorial to help learn the different aspects of Power BI.

The basic building blocks in Power BI are:

• Visualizations
• Datasets
• Reports
• Dashboards
• Tiles

Following are the Types of visualizations available in Power BI:-

Area charts: Basic (Layered) and Stacked

• Bar and column charts
• Donut charts
• Gauge charts
• KPIs
• Line charts
• Maps: Basic maps
• Matrix
• Pie charts
• Tables
• Waterfall charts