Navigating Power BI

- [Instructor] Before you can start creating cool visualizations, you'll need to know the common functions, and the screens used to import and review data. In this lesson, I'll show you how to navigate Power BI Desktop, and connect the importance of reports to the structure of the program. You can install Power BI on your PC by going to the Microsoft Store, and searching for Power BI. When you open Power BI Desktop, you'll see the start screen. Here you can see what's new, the Power BI blog, forums and various tutorials. On the left, it's a menu of options where you can get data, access recent sources or open other reports. Once you close the window, you'll be in the workspace. At the top, you'll see the home ribbon. This ribbon contains the most common Power BI functions. New visual which adds a visualization to your workspace. Excel workbook to import data into the program. And transform data to merge data. On the left is a bar with three buttons for the report, data and model screens. Power BI starts on the report screen. This is where you'll create visualizations. I'll show you a report I'm working on for my sales team. You can download this in the exercise files. It's called sales team visualization. In my workspace, there are three visualizations. When I select the data tab, I can see the data used to create this report. This is the customer table. It looks similar to an Excel table, and on the right is a list of the other data sets imported into Power BI. Next I'll select the model tab. This gives you a graphical representation of your data and its relationships. In this example, you're looking at customers, their orders, the order details, and the products they purchased. Now I'll switch back to the report screen. On the right side of the reports workspace, you'll see three panels, filters, visualizations and fields. You can use filters to modify your visualizations to only show a subset of data. Power BI allows users to easily switch visualization type by simply selecting the visual styles from the visualization panel. There are typical bar charts, pie charts, as well as advanced charts. The fields panel is where you select the data you want to report on. When you import data sources into Power BI, they will show up in the field panel. You will this panel to select fields for your visualizations. Finally, the report workspace is broken down into different pages. You can add more by selecting the plus at the bottom. So that's a quick tour of Power BI. Start small and import data from an Excel workbook into the program, and get comfortable with the tool. Try it out.