Using Power BI Desktop for generating reports (World Economic Outlook Data)
By: Shantanu Jadhav
Tags: Power Bi, Visualization, Data Science, Data Reporting, Data Analytics

Data visualization brings data to life, making you the master storyteller of the insights hidden within your numbers. Live dashboards, interactive reports, charts, graphs, and other visual representations help you unlock key business insight quickly and effectively.

What is Power BI Desktop ?

Power BI Desktop is a free application you install on your local computer that lets you connect to, transform, and visualize your data. With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple different sources of data, and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model. This data model lets you build visuals, and collections of visuals you can share as reports, with other people inside your organization. Most users who work on business intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create reports, and then use the Power BI service to share their reports with others.

Description — In this project I am going to show you step by step how to use Power BI for extracting the data from the web (Here in this project I am using IMF World Economic Data), transforming the data, loading the data to the Power BI, and lastly creating reports in Power BI Desktop. I have explained this project from the scratch so that even a complete beginner can understand it and perform it by himself.

Things needed — Power BI Desktop, IMF World Economic outlook Data, Active Internet Connection

Link to download Power BI Desktop-https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

Link to extract IMF World Economic Outlook Database-https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/SPROLLs/world-economic-outlook-databases#sort=%40imfdate%20descending

Lets Begin,

Extracting Data from IMF World Economic Outlook Database-

After clicking above link select the database of your choice year, I am selecting the latest database available (October 2020).

Selecting latest Database for download

World Economic Outlook Database

The Further Steps we will be following are,

· Connect to data

· Transform and clean that data, to create a data model

· Create visuals, such as charts or graphs, that provide visual representations of the data

· Create reports that are collections of visuals, on one or more report pages

· Share reports with others by using the Power BI service

1) Connect to Data -

Open the Power BI Desktop on your laptop On the left-hand side click on Get Data ->Search Web on the left side and then select it -> Click Connect -> By default it will be selected Basic (don’t change that) and under that in the URL section paste the above link and click OK. As soon as you click OK, you’ll see the Navigator (here you need to select the right table for your dataset, which is table 1) -> Select Table 1 -> On the right side you can see the table view of it -> Click Transform to perform data cleansing and preparation.

Pasting Dataset Link

Table View before Transformation

1) Transform and clean that data, to create a data model -

For the purpose of data cleaning and data pre-processing. This is done step-by-step as follows -

2.1 Turning 2nd row to the column names and removing the 1st row(as it is irrelevant) To do this go to Home ribbon -> Remove Rows -> Type 1 -> click OK. Now, go to Home -> Use the first Row as Headers. You will observe that the 2nd row is changed to headers.