Introduction to Power BI: What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence tool that uses visuals to guide the data to tell a story (1). There are many basic concepts and terms that are vital to navigating this powerful tool more efficiently and to understanding more about the purpose and importance of this software's features.

### So, what are the formats of Power BI?

There are three formats that are important to understand:

1. **Desktop** - This is a free app accessible to all PCs where we can gather, transform, and visualize our data. This is the tool we use to upload our data and build reports. These reports then get published to Power BI service (6).
2. **Service** - This is where business users can publish and view our data reports​ and build dashboards. This is a cloud-based (or software as a service) platform that must be purchased by a business or institution to use. It is mainly used to collaborate, create insights and distribute reports (2). UNO students can access this with their student login information at app.powerbi.com.
3. **Mobile** - This is where business users can view dashboards​ with easy access to the data. It gives the ability to view live visuals, collaborate, and share on the go (7).

Sometimes, Power BI desktop and service can get confused - especially when it comes to where the dashboards are built. Note the Venn diagram above, which helps us distinguish the utilities of the two a bit better (2).

### There are a few key terms that will frequently be used when working in Power BI

**Visualization (visual):** Interactive charts built from reports and datasets

**Dataset:** Container of data

**Report:** One or more pages of interactive texts, visuals, and graphics. This is based off of one singular dataset.

As you can see with this visual, there are multiple pages that derive from a single data source, which possess visualizations to tell stories about the different categories of the data.

**Dashboard:** Single screen that contains tiles which have the most important metrics to tell a story. These can come from one or more datasets.

As you can see with this visual, it is a singular page that has taken key visuals from multiple pages from the report above (3).

### Why is learning more about Power BI important?

Power BI is one of the fastest growing business intelligence clouds on the market, so knowing more about it can give individuals a great edge when job-seeking. Some of the features that make it attractive are that it is relatively inexpensive, is easy to use and learn, pairs well with excel, releases monthly updates, boasts easy connection to hundreds of data sources​, and allows for custom innovations (4).

Additionally, there are a few major companies that have adopted Power BI (5).

* Nestle - This company made Power BI available to everyone in the company and has over 45,000 monthly active users. It uses Power BI to create dashboards for each of the company’s brands and constructs consumer metrics dashboard too.
* Humana - This is a health insurance company that utilizes Power BI to display how social determinants such as where people live, work, and play affect their individual health needs. It has been critical for Humana to get their users to adopt and learn the tool, especially considering Power BI users have more than doubled since the beginning of COVID-19.
* Adobe - This company is yet another example that pairs Power BI with their analytics cloud in order to build dashboards that easily operate with their other platform services. They have appreciated Power BI's ability to easily scale and explore multiple data sources.

To conclude our basic overview, we will walk through the common workflow users follow when working in Power BI.

### The common workflow users typically follow:

1. Bring data into Power BI desktop, and create a report​
2. Publish report to Power BI Service, where you can create new visualizations or build dashboards​
3. Share dashboards with others​ from Service
4. View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in the mobile app ​

Something to take note of about the common workflow is shown in the black box of the above visual. Knowing how to create and share visuals is a great skill, but the key is creating visuals that allow us to efficiently and confidently make business decisions that better our organization (3).

## Getting Started in Power BI

### Importing Data

Power BI allows you to get data from a variety of sources. Some common sources include: files on a local computer or a database house on the web. A full list of data sources can be found on the learn Microsoft website. Below you can see the process for loading data to PowerBI. In most real world reporting, multiple sources from multiple locations will be used to generate data rich insights.

Selecting "Get Data" from the "Home" tab in the ribbon will allow you to import data from many common data sources.

From this point, you can connect to a live data source, load one-time data as-is, or transform data.

#### Transforming Data

When data is selected, users can transform, shape, and edit data to use in Power BI, using built-in functionality. Data transformation is an important step in building PowerBI reports.

Examples of basic transformations are:

* Data type changes (e.g. changing zip code column from a "number" type to "zip code" type)
* Filtering
* Column creation and splitting.
* Renaming/Reformatting Data

Advance data transformation include but are not limited to:

* Power Query
* Combining data sources
* Custom calculations using DAX

### Basics of Visuals

Once you have data available, you can begin to visualize it. The visualizations panel presents many options for visualizations, as well as the option to import custom visualizations.

Selecting a visual allows you to select the fields you want displayed, as well as formatting options, filtering, and more.

Visualizations can be linked to give your dashboard a high level of interactivity.

PowerBI functionality contains several different types of visualizations to present data to users. Common visualization types include bar charts, pie charts, line and scatter graphs, tables, matrices, and maps. Further, PowerBI allows users to create visuals that interact with each other.

## Common Visualizations in Power BI and Edits

### Pie and Donut Charts

Pie charts and donut charts allow data to be displayed via the shading of a circle. These kinds of visualizations were very common due to their intuitive nature. With pie charts, the circle is shaded with different colors, with different sizes of the "slices" representing different proportions. Pie charts are sometimes criticized, however, as it can be difficult to discern relative slice sizes when there are a large number of slices.

Pie and Donut charts include:

* Pie chart
* Donut chart
* Gauge

### Bar Charts

Bar charts allow users to create vertical or horizontal bars whose lengths represent the relative sizes or counts of a given category. Similar to pie charts, bar charts are common for their simplicity, and can be a useful tool for visualizing count data. Bar charts would not typically make sense to use when the independent variable is a numeric value.

Bar charts include:

* Stacked bar chart
* Stacked column chart
* Clustered bar chart
* Clustered column chart
* 100% stacked bar chart
* 100% stacked column chart
* Waterfall chart
* Funnel

### Line and Area Charts

Line charts and area charts allow users to graph numerical data, especially when both the independent variable and dependent variable are numerical values, which is where they differ from bar charts.

Line and area charts include:

* Line chart
* Area chart
* Stacked area chart
* Line and stacked column chart
* Line and clustered column chart
* Ribbon chart
* Scatter chart

### Miscellaneous visualizations

There are several other miscellaneous visualizations in PowerBI, including tree maps (which show counts based on relative areas of rectangles within a larger rectangle), maps, cards, tables, matrices, key influencer chart, and more. All of these charts represent the vast array of possibilities in using PowerBI to represent data through visual means.

To make edits to visualizations, click on the image, and select the "the format your visual button". You can use the search bar to help you find a category, or scroll through the various options to adjust the aesthetic of your visual's formatting. This feature applies for all types of visualizations, though the options of format edits will be different for different visualizations.

Sources:

(1) https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/definition/Microsoft-Power-BI#:~:text=Power%20BI%20was%20released%20as,Desktop%20from%20the%20Windows%20Store.

(2) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/service-service-vs-desktop

(3) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/end-user-basic-concepts

(4) https://www.absentdata.com/power-bi-pros-and-cons/

(5) https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-showcase/

(6) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/desktop-getting-started

(7) https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/