Getting started with Power BI
Prepare data for analysis and model data in Power BI.
Power BI is a business analytics software used to create & publish reports and data stories from your data sets. You can make highly interactive, engaging, and powerful reports, dashboards, or visuals with Power BI. You can connect to any data (Excel files, SQL databases, BI warehouses, Cloud data, APIs, web pages, and more), combine the data, link one table with others, create clickable visualizations.
It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end-users to create their own reports and dashboards. Power BI provides cloud-based BI (business intelligence) services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop-based interface, called “Power BI Desktop”.
- Ribbon — Displays common tasks that are associated with reports and visualizations present below the taskbar.
- Fields Pane — Displays the tables, folders, and fields in your data that are available for you to use to create visualizations.
- Visualizations Pane — Where you can change visualizations, customize colors or axes, apply filters, drag fields, and more.
- Filter Pane — Where you can apply filters
- Report View or Canvas — Where visualizations are created and arranged.
- Report, Data, and Model views- You can switch between Report, Data, and Model views by selecting the icons in the left column.
- Pages tab — Located along the bottom of the page, this area is where you would select or add a report page
Prepare Data for Analysis
For data analysis, I have prepared six different tables with data related to sales details for various products and branches in Excel. The table structure is shown in the below image.
Model Data in PowerBI
After preparing the data, use it to perform data analysis and model data in Power BI. Power BI provides various ways to load data. For loading data from Excel, choose the option of Excel book and select the .xlsx file.
In the fields section, you can view all the loaded tables as shown below. One can easily edit and manage these tables in the Table tab.
Create and manage relationships between tables, create or edit relations and generate the model as done below.
To generate the model, open the model tab and observe the tables and relationships between those tables. The below snapshot shows the model generated.
That's it for this blog! In the coming blogs, we will create dashboards and explore more about Power BI.
