How to Use Microsoft Power BI Service

Edited 3 weeks ago by ExtremeHow Editorial Team

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Microsoft Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that helps you gain insights into your organization. This powerful cloud service allows you to collect, analyze, visualize, and share data in a user-friendly interface. The purpose of this document is to give you detailed information on how to transform your raw data into meaningful insights using the Microsoft Power BI service. This explanation will cover the basics, demonstrate how to connect your data to the service, guide you in creating visualizations, and explain how to share your reports with others. Let's start step by step.

Getting started with the Microsoft Power BI service

Create an account and log in

The first step to using the Microsoft Power BI service is to create an account. You can proceed as follows:

1. Visit the official Power BI website and click on the ‘Sign Up’ button.
2. Enter your work email address and follow the instructions on the screen. This will guide you through the process of verifying your email and creating a password.
3. Once your account is created, you can log in using the ‘Sign In’ button available on the Power BI homepage.

Keep in mind that using a work or school email address can sometimes provide additional perks, especially in organizational settings.

Navigating the Power BI interface

Upon logging in, you'll be greeted by the Power BI dashboard. Here's how to navigate through the interface:

• Home: This is your main workspace where you can view recent reports, dashboards, and datasets.
• My workspace: This serves as your personal space to create and manage your Power BI content.
• Shared with me: Find reports and dashboards that others have shared with you.
• Apps: Apps bundle related dashboards and reports into a single container. It can be created and shared within organizations.

Connecting your data to Power BI

Understanding data sources

Power BI can connect to a wide variety of data sources. Whether your data is in cloud-based sources like Azure, Salesforce, or online services like Google Analytics, or on-premises sources like SQL Server or Excel, Power BI is flexible enough to handle them all.

Connecting to data sources

Here's a simple example of connecting Power BI to an Excel file:

1. First, log in to your Power BI account on the web.
2. Click on 'Get Data' at the bottom of the navigation pane.
3. Select 'Files' and choose 'Local File' if the file is stored on your computer.
4. Navigate to the location of the file, select it, and click ‘Open.’ Power BI will load the file and prepare the data.

Similarly, you can connect to other data sources by selecting the appropriate option from the ‘Get Data’ section.

Creating visualizations

Introduction to Power BI reports and dashboards

In Power BI, reports are collections of visualizations on one or more pages, also called visual metrics. Dashboards consist of one page and are often created by pinning visuals from reports to provide a quick overview of your data.

Create your first report

To create a basic report:

1. In your My Workspace, select the dataset you want to create a report from.
2. Click on ‘Create Report.’ This will open the report editor.
3. You can now start adding visualizations to your report by dragging fields from your dataset to the report canvas.
4. For example, drag the Sales Amount field onto the canvas to create a simple column chart.

Enhance your reports with different visualizations

Microsoft Power BI provides several types of visualizations such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, maps, tables, etc. You should choose a visualization that best represents your data to help understand it better.

To change the type of visualization:

1. Click the chart in the report editor canvas.
2. On the Visualization pane, you can select different visualization types to see how the data looks with each one.
3. Choosing the right chart type is important because it determines how effectively your data tells a story.

Customizing your Power BI report

Using filters and slicers

Filters and slicers enable you to focus on specific information in a report:

• Filter: Apply a filter if you want to display data based on specific conditions. You can drag a field to the 'Filter' area in the visualization pane to apply a filter.
• Slicers: Use slicers to achieve the same effect as filters, but they are represented visually in the report so users can interact with them.

For example, to filter a sales report to show only data from a particular year, drag the Year field in the dataset to the 'Filter' pane and select the required year.

Add a drillthrough page

Drillthrough allows you to create a page focused on a specific entity in your report. This is useful when you want to focus more on a specific aspect of your dataset:

1. Create a new page in your report.
2. Add visualizations, focusing on the details you want to focus on.
3. Add the fields you're interested in to the 'Drillthrough Filter' area.
4. Users will now be able to access this new page by right-clicking on any data point in your other reports.

Report sharing and collaboration

Ways to share reports and dashboards

Once you've created a report or dashboard, you can share it with others in your organization:

• Sharing via Power BI: In Power BI, click 'Share' at the top of the report or dashboard. Enter the recipients' email addresses and any messaging you want to include. You may need a Power BI Pro license, or your organization may store the report on a Power BI service capacity.
• Publishing to the web: If you want to make a report public, use the 'Embed report' option. This lets you create a link that anyone can access without needing a Power BI account. Be careful with this option as it makes your data publicly available on the internet.

Collaborating in Power BI

The Power BI service allows collaborative working through various functionalities:

• Workspaces: Create collaborative workspaces for better teamwork. This lets multiple users have access to the same set of resources.
• Comments: Use the comments feature in Power BI to discuss different parts of a report directly in the reports and dashboards.

Advanced features and best practices

Using Power BI DAX for calculations

DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a library of functions and operators that can be used to create expressions and produce calculations within Power BI. Using DAX, we can create calculated fields that help us gain new information.

    Sales Growth = ([CurrentYearSales] - [PreviousYearSales]) / [PreviousYearSales]

This DAX formula calculates the growth in sales compared to the previous year.

Set up data refresh

Power BI allows you to set up data refreshes to ensure your reports and dashboards are using the most current data:

1. Go to the settings of your dataset in the Power BI service.
2. Under the ‘Scheduled Refresh’ section, enable the option and specify your refresh frequency and time.
3. Make sure your data source credentials are updated so that Power BI can access your datasets.

Best practices for using Power BI

To get the best results from Power BI, follow these best practices:

• Keep your dataset lightweight by removing unnecessary fields and tables before uploading to Power BI.
• Use an intuitive naming convention for your fields and tables to make it easier for other users to understand your reports.
• Always make sure your data is clean and well-organized.
• Take advantage of Power BI’s built-in themes to maintain visual consistency across reports.

Conclusion

Microsoft Power BI is an extremely powerful tool for transforming data into actionable insights. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you will be able to navigate its interface, connect your data, create and share informative reports, and collaborate effectively with others. Always remember to explore the wide range of visualizations and functionality it offers. This journey will upgrade the way you handle your data and gain insights from it, ultimately helping you make informed business decisions.

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