What is Power BI and How Does It Work?
So the big question then…what is Power BI? That’s what we’re answering in this article, so that you can start to understand what it does and how it works and why it really is such a big step up from other data reporting platforms like Excel.
To business then! To answer our question on what Power BI is, we’ve got a short 8 minute video, exploring what Power BI is, who created it, how highly it’s regarded within business intelligence industries and so on. We’ll then give a high level summary of how it works, including data sources it can connect to, to create visualisations and and then how it can create reports from those visualisations. After that we’ll talk about the Power BI journey, giving an overview of how to create a report from something as simple as a CSV file and share it with others on the Power BI service. Finally we’ll have a look at some of Power BI’s advantages like how it automates data transformation tasks, how it has single click refresh (or automated schedule refresh!) and how it intuitive it is to use
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Video Chapters
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:32 – What is Power BI?
- 02:38 – What does Power BI do?
- 04:40 – The process of creating a report with the Power BI journey
- 06:41 – Why I love Power BI!
Short On Time?
What does Power BI do?
Power BI is Microsoft’s reporting software and is widely regarded as one of the world’s best reporting tools.
Power BI works by connecting to data held in hundreds of different places like; business wide data warehouses, through systems such as Salesforce, to tables held in Excel files, and the best bit is that information from all these places can be used in a single Power BI report!
Once Power BI has connected to those datasets, it then aggregates (generally adding together or counting) the data in the columns (or fields) of the datasets to create charts or visualisations. Report developers then create reports from lots of visualisations put together,
The Power BI Journey
There’s a four step process to creating a Power BI report – this is the Power BI Journey!
- Power Query – job one, connect Power BI to your data sources using Power Query, whether the data is in CSV files, Excel, Oracle, Salesforce, a website or pretty much anywhere else. Once all your datasets are connected, then transform and clean the datasets so that they can be used in the next stage…
- Data Model – once all your datasets are cleaned and transformed then they you can add them to the Data Model. Here you can add new columns, add new measures, which are like totals at the bottom of a column, and crucially you can relate all the datasets from your data sources together so that they act like one big dataset.
- Report View – once you’ve set up your Data Model, in the Report View simply click on a visual, like a pie chart or bar chart, that you want and click on the data fields that you want to use to populate your visual. Put lots of visuals together to make a report.
- Share the Reports – Whether by saving your Power BI report on a shared drive or by publishing the report on Power BI Online, you can share your fabulous report with others in the business!
- Refresh the report – save down new or updated datasets to your data source and click the refresh button to update your Power BI report.
…and a little more
Power BI Desktop is free!
Ready to get started?
A free 1 hour course to find out more about the different parts of Power BI, see a finished report up close in the flesh (on the screen) and understand how it’s put together. By the end of the course you’ll have enough to go off and start experimenting with Power BI yourself.
This 7 hour course that builds on Introduction to Power BI by teaching the basic elements of Power BI and then guiding you through creating a beginner report. You’ll then be guided through a second more complex report to get started on your Power BI Journey.
A complete 18 hour course building on Getting Started With Power BI that teaches the basics of Power BI and then guides you through the creation of 4 varied reports ranging from beginner to advanced, combining Power BI theory with report writing and error fixing practice
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