Power BI Desktop by steps #1 — Overview
If you’re into data, Microsoft Power BI is one of the must-know tools, for many reasons. In this series, I want to walk through the essential features of Power BI Desktop to import, transform, and build insights on data, in a simple and practical way.
· Intro
· What we can do with Power BI Desktop
· Getting started with Power BI Desktop
∘ 1. Get Data
∘ 2. Transform Data
∘ 3. Data Modeling
∘ 4. Data VisualizationIntro
Power BI Desktop is the core tool within Microsoft Power BI, to do actual development: data collection, transformation, modeling, building reports and dashboards.
When I first started using it, I found the amount of material and information simply overwhelming to get started and learn it quickly.
Here my goal is to go straight to the point: clearly explain the essential and to quickly get up to speed.
What we can do with Power BI Desktop
We need it for 4 main complementary tasks:
- Connecting to data of any kind: from files, databases, web, etc. Structured or not.
2. Transforming data: cleaning it, adding intelligence, business rules, changing formats, etc.
3. Modeling data: combining multiple data sources together in a single data model that makes business sense to allow insight (e.g. with 3 data sources such as Customers, Sales, Product we can build a single data model aiming to give sale performances insights)
4. Visualizing data: building data visualizations to extract actual information from data.
Getting started with Power BI Desktop
Once you’ve downloaded, installed and launched Power BI Desktop, let’s see where the 4 main tasks just introduced above can be found within the tool
1. Get Data
When clicking the “Get data” button, you can connect to a number of different data sources.
Let’s suppose our source data is in an Excel spreadsheet so that you can Demo easily if you wish so: once you select “Excel Workbook” in the source list, and you browse your local source file, the following windows allow establishing a connection between Power BI and your file.
By clicking Load, the source data are imported in PowerBI Desktop data model, so that you can continue with the next tasks.
2. Transform Data
By clicking on the button “Transform data” (see task 2. in the image “Power BI Desktop — Main” above), you will see another window appearing. That’s a very powerful tool called “Power Query”, which is specifically dedicated to building all sorts of data manipulations, restructuring, enhancements and cleansing.
Once you have created all the required data processing and transformation steps, by clicking Close & Apply you leave Power Query and are ready to continue your next task: data modeling.
3. Data Modeling
In practice, our source data are always stored in multiple data sources, for instance, database tables. In order to build analytics or any sort of data process to actual insights we need to relate all data sources, so that Power BI knows how to combine source data: to do so we use the “Model” button.
Suppose that we imported 2 data sources, one listing the Sale Transactions made through a website, the other listing the corresponding customers: we know that each sale was made by a certain customer, so we can relate them through the customer identifier that exists in both data sources.
If you click on the view “Model” you can import the data source and build their relationships.
Once the data model is finished, Power BI knows how the data from the 2 sources have to be combined, if we mix data from both sources in data visualization to get a view of transactions by customer.
4. Data Visualization
To build visualizations on the data model you just built, click on the “Report” view and combine the object from the different sources: here I just show the total amount sold (sourced from the Transactions data source), by customer name (sourced from the Customers data source).
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