Power BI Desktop UI Elements — Part 1

Image by author

Table of contents

• Overview
• Pre-requisites
• Power BI Desktop
• Ribbons in Power BI Desktop
• Views in Power BI Desktop: Report View, Data View, and Model View

Overview

Hey!!! Welcome to the 2nd article of the Power BI Series. As you would have known what Power BI is, from our 1st article. Let’s dive into what Power BI Desktop is all about. And know what the different sections are available in it. We will try to cover most of the Desktop elements in two Parts. This blog focuses on the 1st part of those elements.

Before any report-building activity, it’s important to know where different elements are available in the tool so that we can access them and proceed with our report development. So here you will learn about different elements of Power BI Desktop with its updated UI.

For the people who are new to this blog, it’s recommended for you to go through the 1st article and install Power BI Desktop onto your systems to check all the below features in Power BI Desktop.

So, let’s get started with it!!!

Pre-requisites

• The Latest Version of the Power BI Desktop is installed on your system.
• Any sample dataset in the form of an Excel file loaded in Power BI Desktop.

What is Power BI Desktop

• Power BI Desktop is a windows desktop application where you can connect to any data source, transform the data with queries that build insightful data models and create visualizations and reports on the data models.
• Once a report is created in Power BI Desktop, it can be published (uploaded) into Power BI Service where it can be shared with other users further so that it is accessed.

Now, Let’s have a look at the Latest UI from Power BI Desktop:

Image by Author

Ribbons in Power BI Desktop

Ribbons: The sections which are available on top of the Power BI Desktop UI.

Generally, you have File, home, insert, modeling, view, and help ribbons when you install Power BI Desktop on your system.

As you can see, this Ribbon style is like the style we see on Excel and other Microsoft tools and that’s why it’s so easy for us to understand the Power BI UI easily.

Let’s go through the features we will be mostly using from these Ribbons while building our reports.

Home Ribbon

• It has features related to Data Connectivity, recent data sources, and the transformation query section.
• Adding new visuals from Power BI visuals or from AppSource (Custom Visuals).
• Inserting text box, measure creation, sensitivity labeling of data, and Publishing report to Power BI Service.

Image by Author

Insert Ribbon

• Insert Ribbon has a Page section for creating Blank & Duplicating Pages.
• Visuals section for inserting new visuals. AI-based visuals and Power Platform visuals like Power Apps & Power Automate.
• The elements section to create new visual Elements has certain important elements like Text Boxes, Buttons, Shapes, and Images which can be loaded into reports and used accordingly.

Image by Author

Modeling Ribbon

• Modeling Ribbon focuses on the relationship in the data model.
• Creation of Measures and Columns.
• Implementation of Row-Level-Security and Q&A features.

Image by Author

View Ribbon

• View Ribbon has Themes to change the Report colors.
• Mobile Layout to create the Mobile Version of the Report.
• Page Options like Page scaling, gridlines & locking objects.
• View Ribbon consists of the Most Important Panes in Power BI Desktop which includes:
• Filters Pane
• Bookmarks Pane
• Selection Pane
• Performance Analyzer
• Sync Slicers

Image by Author

Help Ribbon

• Help Ribbon has the Version, documentation-related information, and the community endpoint for submitting ideas related to Power BI.

Image by Author

External Tools

• The External Tools section is enabled when we have installed some of the below-supporting tools for Power BI and those tools will be listed in this section.

Image by Author

Views in Power BI Desktop

There are three views in Power BI Desktop which are shown in the below image:

Image by Author

Report View

This is the default view, where we create our reports and visuals on our data. The below image shows the report view, where you can see the report.

Also, there are three panes on the Report View on the right-hand side. Those are Filters Pane, Visualizations Pane, and Fields Pane which are enabled by default.

Features

• Allows us to build the report from a variety of visualizations.
• Allows us to create DAX measures & columns on top of our datasets.

Data View

In this view, you see the data in tabular format. It will look in the same way as you see in an excel file.

We can create columns in this view, check the data types of columns, and update their data types if required.

Features

• Allows us to create new calculated columns and measures from this view.
• Allows us to change the data type of the columns.

Image by Author

Model View

Model view shows all the tables, columns, and relationships in your model. This view can be especially helpful when your model has complex relationships between many tables.

Select the Model icon near the side of the window (as highlighted in the below image) to see a view of the existing model.

Features

• Allows us to create the data model between the Fact and Dimension Tables.
• Allows us to hide the measures, columns, or tables in the report view.
• Allows us to customize the column data type as required from the Properties section.

Image by Author

And that’s all folks! I hope you have got a basic understanding of some of the basic elements in Power BI Desktop with this article!! We will cover the rest of the elements in the upcoming blog i.e., Power BI Desktop UI Elements Part-2.

Thank you for reading this blog, I hope you found it insightful. Please do follow for more content on Power BI. And let us know if there are any queries in the Respond section below.

This series includes the following articles:

Power BI Blog Series: Part 1 — Power BI Overview

If you have reached this far, thank you for reading this blog, I hope you found it insightful 😃. Give us a follow for more content on technology, productivity, work habits, and more!