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01 - What is Power BI?.md

Power BI :

• a collection of software services, apps, and connectors
• work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.
  • Whether your data is :
    • a simple Excel spreadsheet
    • a collection of cloud-based
    • on-premises hybrid data warehouses
  • Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize (or discover) what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

02 - The parts of Power BI.md

3 elements :

1. Desktop
   • publish Desktop reports to the Power BI service
2. online SaaS Service
   • view inventory and manufacturing progress in a real-time dashboard
3. Mobile
   • monitor progress

The flow of work in Power BI

A common flow of work in Power BI begins in Power BI Desktop, where a report is created. That report is then published to the Power BI service, and then shared so users of Power BI Mobile apps can consume the information.

03 - Using Power BI.md

The common flow of activity in Power BI is the following:

1. Bring data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report.
2. Publish to the Power BI service, where you create new visualizations or build dashboards
3. Share your dashboards with others, especially people who are on the go
4. View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in Power BI Mobile apps

04 - The building blocks of Power BI (Visualizations | Datasets | Reports | Dashboards | Tiles).md

The basic building blocks in Power BI are the following:

• Visualizations
• Datasets
• Reports
• Dashboards
• Tiles

Visualizations

Visualizations :

• a visual representation of data
  • (such as a chart, a graph, a color-coded map, or other interesting things)
  • you can create to represent your data visually.

The goal of a visual :

• to present data in a way
  • that provides context and insights
  • either of which would likely be difficult to discern from a raw table of numbers or text.

Datasets

A dataset :

• a collection of data
  • that Power BI uses to create its visualizations.

the multitude of data connectors :

• a simple dataset based on a single table from Excel workbook
  • 
• a combination of many different sources
  • which you can filter and combine to provide a unique collection data (a dataset) for use in Power BI.
  • e.g.
    • combine :
      • create a dataset from three different database fields :
        1. one website table
        2. an Excel table
        3. online results of an email marketing campaign.
    • filter :
      • Filtering data before bringing it into Power BI
      • focus on the data that matters to you

Reports

a report :

• a collection of visualizations
  • that appear together on one or more pages
• a collection of items that are related to one another
• created in Power BI Online Service / Desktop

Reports let you create many visualizations, on multiple different pages if necessary, and lets you arrange them in whatever way best tells your story, then let you gather and organize your visualizations onto one (or more) pages.

Dashboards

dashboard :

• a collection of visuals from a single page
  • that you can share with others
  • When share a single page from a report, or share a collection of visualizations, you create a dashboard.
• a selected group of visuals
  • that provide quick insight into the data or story you’re trying to present.

A dashboard has to fit on a single page, often called a canvas

• (the canvas is the blank backdrop in Power BI Desktop, or the service, where you place visualizations).

Tiles

a tile :

• a single visualization found in a report or on a dashboard.
• the rectangular box that contains each individual visual

05 - A quick look at the Power BI service.md

quickly create visuals in Power BI: content packs

content packs

A content pack :

• a collection of pre-configured, ready-made visuals and reports based on specific data sources

how it works?

Get Data (with cloud services)

Figure - select the Get Data button in the bottom left corner of the home screen.

Figure - The canvas (the area in the center of the Power BI service) shows you the available sources of data in the Power BI service.

Figure - Power BI provides content packs for all sorts of services. (select Get from the Services box)

Figure - import data from Service GitHub

Figure - Once the data is loaded, the pre-defined GitHub content pack dashboard appears.

Figure - In addition to the Dashboard, the Report that was generated (as part of the GitHub content pack) to create the dashboard is available too, as is the Dataset (the collection of data pulled from GitHub) that was created during the data import, and used to create the GitHub Report.

Asking questions of your data

Figure - Power BI creates a number visual showing the Count of Issues closed, based on what is typed in the Natural Language Query bar.

When you have a visual that you like, you can select the Pin icon, to the right of the Natural Language Query bar, to pin that visual to the dashboard. Figure - In this case, the visual is pinned to the GitHub dashboard, since that’s the dashboard currently selected.

Refreshing data in the Power BI service

Figure - refresh the dataset for a content pack, or other data you use in Power BI (To set refresh settings, select the ellipses (the three dots) next to a data set, and a menu appears.)

Figure - Select the Schedule Refresh option from the bottom of that menu.

Power BI & Excel.md

Upload Excel data to Power BI

Goal :

• how you can import an Excel workbook file containing a simple table from a local drive into Power BI

1. Make sure your data is formatted as a table

• data needs to be formatted as a table
• make sure each column has a good name
  • easy to find the data when creating your reports in Power BI

2. Import from a local drive

Figure - In Power BI, Get Data > Files > Local File

Your files don't have to be on a local drive, of course. If you save your files on OneDrive or SharePoint Team Site, that's even better.

3. Start creating reports

Once your workbook's data has been imported, a dataset is created in Power BI. It appears under Datasets.

Now you can begin exploring your data by creating reports and dashboards.

Just click on the Open menu icon next to the dataset and then click Explore.

A new blank report canvas appears.

Over on the right, under Fields, you'll see your tables and columns.

Just select the fields you want to create a new visualization on the canvas.

You can change the type of visualization and apply filters and other properties under Visualizations.