Power BI Beginner’s Guide

Business Intelligence made easy

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What is Power BI

Power bi is a user-friendly software application developed by Microsoft tailored toward business intelligence. Power BI is a set of software tools that work together to transform data from disparate sources into aesthetically appealing and interactive insights.

By introducing straightforward drag and drop features for creating visualizations and reports, Power bi has managed to reduce the constraints that users without a coding experience face.

Your data could be in the form of an excel spreadsheet, a text document, a cloud-based collection, or an on-premises heterogeneous data warehouse.

History of Power BI

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

This great software tool we all use today started as a small project named “Gemini” in 2006 within the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Team at Microsoft under the leadership of Amir Netz. The project “Gemini” was later renamed “Power Pivot” in 2009.

Microsoft subsequently developed “Power View” as part of SharePoint in 2012 in an attempt to compete with Tableau’s then-powerful visualization capabilities, although Power View was not particularly impressive.

In 2013, Microsoft developed “Power Query” to make it easier to retrieve data and integrate it into Power Pivot, however Power Query, like Power Pivot, was only accessible as an add-in in Excel.

Microsoft finally introduced Power BI in 2015, which can be found at PowerBI.com. It clarified the hazy Power Pivot and SharePoint concepts. Power BI moved out of its hidden shell into general availability. It’s thought to be a SAAS solution that sends information to your web browser and phone for a set period of time.

Why do you need Power BI?

There are a number of reasons why you need power BI in your business, I will be highlighting a few of them here

• The Q&A feature. Asking a question in natural language is sometimes the quickest method to acquire an answer from your data, and that’s precisely what Q&A allows customers to accomplish, making this feature a “top-cited” advantage in attaining self-service business intelligence.
• Users may develop strong, reusable data models with SQL Server analysis services on-premises and Azure analysis services in the cloud, providing consistent reporting and analytics.
• Data source accessibility. The ability to connect to virtually any application or data source (hundreds of options), whether those resources are hosted in the cloud or on-premises. Excel spreadsheets, GitHub, Mail Chimp, SharePoint, and Google Analytics are just a few examples.
• Power BI is simple to use. Even basic users will find it to have a short learning curve. Its simplicity is one of its biggest advantages
• Low prices and quick turnarounds. Businesses may make educated judgments about which markets are booming and which are underperforming by examining the most recent data. Furthermore, the company maintains custody of the data at all times and may do the analysis internally to save money.

Power BI Versions

Power BI currently has three (3) and you can use any of the three best suited for your need

1. Microsoft Power BI Free / Desktop. Data cleansing and preparation, custom visualization, and the option to publish to the Power BI service are all included in this free single-user package. You can easily download and install it on your personal computer
2. Microsoft Power BI Pro. The pro package is $9.99 per user each month. It covers data collecting, data governance, dashboard creation, and report publishing across online apps and software.
3. Microsoft Power BI Premium. The Power BI Premium license, unlike the Free or Pro licenses, is not a per-user license. Instead, a Power BI Premium license gives each user in the company an allocated unit of capacity. This dedicated capacity (also known as Premium Workspace) may be used to store huge datasets of up to 50GB in the cloud, with a total storage capacity of 100TB. Rather than depending on Microsoft’s shared capacity, it allows your company to employ its own dedicated capacity and gear.

Installing Power BI

To get started with the installation of power Bi software as a beginner, you can visit the Power BI website to get more understanding of what power BI is and then make the download

This appears on the screen, displaying the official Power BI welcome page. The dropping of credentials, as with any online page for sharing tasks and dashboards, is quite important.

This process is okay for beginners but if you want to download the software without going through the website and signing up, you can just visit the Power BI desktop webpage and click on the download button.

It will take you to this screen,

Initiating the app

After installation, on starting the app for the first time, it will go through an initialization process which might take a long time (You can grab a cup of coffee here while you wait). Upon finishing, you will be asked to log in to your Office 365 account in order to be able to share your dashboards and reports.

Then it will bring you to this page:

The desktop version does not require an internet connection. You only need to be connected while publishing your report.

Power BI has three different views which are:

• Report view. Where you can utilize queries you write to create stunning visualizations that you can share with others, ordered as you want them to look and with numerous pages.
• Data view. Examine your report’s data in data model format, where you may add measurements, additional columns, and connections.
• Relationships view. Get a graphical depiction of the relationships that have been built in your data model and manage or edit them as needed using the Relationships view.

You can access these views by selecting any one of the three icons on the left side of the image. The report view is being currently selected in the image. The icon next to it is for the data view and the third icon is for the relationship view.

Data Source

You can import data from different sources as seen in the image below using the Get data icon button

Visualization and Field Pane

This image shows both the visualization pane and the fields pane. The visualization pane allows you to select different charts and visuals you will like to represent your data.

You can visualize a column in Power BI by clicking on your preferred visual in the visualization pane and selecting the column or columns in the fields pane. You can create different visuals such as funnel, treemap, KPI, card, map, slicer, R, matrix, and so on.

In the next series of this article, I will show you step-by-step how you can visualize data using Power BI.