Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide

Build dashboards and visualizations to make your data come to life

Devin Knight, Brian Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Manuel Quintana

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789130928
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

Bring your data to life with Power BI

Key Features

• Get to grips with the fundamentals of Microsoft Power BI and its Business Intelligence capabilities
• Build accurate analytical models, reports and dashboards
• Get faster and more intuitive insights from your data using Microsoft Power BI

Book Description

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based service that helps you easily visualize and share insights using your organization's data.This book will get you started with business intelligence using the Power BI toolset, covering essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to make your data come to lifeYou will learn how to get your data the way you want – connecting to data sources sources and how to clean your data with the Power BI Query Editor. You will next learn how to properly design your data model to make your data easier to work with.. You will next learn how to properly design your data model to navigate table relationships and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with.Visualizing your data is another key element of this book, and you will learn how to follow proper data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques.By the end of this book, you will understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented

What you will learn

• Connect to data sources using both import and DirectQuery options
• Use the Query Editor to apply data transformations and data cleansing processes, including learning how to write M and R scripts
• Design optimized data models by designing relationships and DAX calculations
• Leverage built-in and custom visuals to design effective reports
• Use the Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service to implement Row Level Security on your model
• Administer a Power BI cloud tenant for your organization
• Deploy your Power BI Desktop files into the Power BI Report Server

Who this book is for

This book is for aspiring Business Intelligence professionals who want to get up and running with Microsoft Power BI. If you have a basic understanding of BI concepts and want to learn how to apply them using Microsoft Power BI, this book is for you.

]]>

Visualizing Data

Up to this point, you have spent some time importing data and modeling it to your specifications. In this chapter, we will take that hard work and begin to visualize the data in efficient and effective ways. The most common association with Power BI for consumers is the ability to create very impactful visualizations of data, and there are many options available to do this. In this chapter, we will look at all the various options that are available to you within the Power BI Desktop application. Additionally, we will take a brief glimpse at the additional visualization options that are available through the Custom Visuals Marketplace. The topics detailed in this chapter are as follows:

• Data visualization basics
• Visuals for filtering
• Visualizing tabular data
• Visualizing categorical data
• Visualizing trend data
• Visualizing KPI data
• Visualizing geographical data
• Leveraging Power BI custom visuals
• Data visualization tips and tricks

At the time of this book's publication, there are 30 readily available visuals in the Power BI Desktop application; this includes the Shape map visual that is in the preview options. We will be exploring most of them and how they best work with certain types of data sets to bring the model we have worked on until this point to life!

With Power BI's rapid update cycle, there will be many visuals added to the application over time. If you would like to leverage these as soon as they are available, you can find them in the Preview section of the application's options. Figure 5-1 shows how to access the Preview Features area. Once you have enabled something in this area, it usually requires you to restart the Power BI application, so make sure to save your work! The path is File||Options and Settings||Options||Preview Features.

How to turn on Preview Features can be seen here:

Figure 5-1

Data visualization basics

As soon as you launch the Power BI desktop application and close out of the initial splash screen, you will find yourself in the Report View, which is where we will stay for the duration of this chapter. In the previous chapter, you explored the Relationship view as well as the Data view, but these areas are not necessary for the visualization work we will be doing. There are many items of interest in this initial Report view area that we need to discuss so that we can work efficiently. Let's open the completed Power BI file from Chapter 4, Leveraging DAX, which includes all of the calculated columns and calculated measures that we will use in the upcoming visuals.

Let's review the key items from Figure 5-2:

For this chapter, you can build on top of the completed PBIX file from Chapter 4, Leveraging DAX. If you would like to keep your work from each chapter separate, please follow the noted steps here. Open the completed PBIX file called Chapter 5, Visualizing Data. Then, under the File option, choose Save As and give this file a new name for the work we will be doing in Chapter 5, Visualizing Data.

Figure 5-2

1. Report view: This is the button that will place us in the Report canvas and allow us to create visuals.
2. Visuals area: This is where we can choose which visual, we would like to use. Once custom visuals are added, they will appear here as well.

3. Field area: This area will change depending on the visual but it is where we place the fields we will use within the selected visual.
4. Field pane: These are all the available fields we have to choose from to add to our visuals.
5. Format area: Here is where we can decide on many things specific to either the entire report page or the selected visual, such as text size, font style, titles, and so on.
6. Filters area: This is where we can apply filters of various scopes:
   • Page-level filters: Any filters applied here will affect every single visual on the selected page.
   • Drillthrough filters: This option allows users to pass a filter value from a different report page to this one. This will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 6, Digital Storytelling with Power BI.
   • Report-level filters: Filters applied here will affect every single visual for the entire Power BI report.
   • Visual-level filters: This category will only appear when you have a visual selected, and the applied filters will only affect the selected visual.
7. Custom visuals: By selecting this button, you will have a menu appear that has access to all the custom visuals from the Microsoft store. You can then add whichever visual you would like to the Visuals area.
8. Report page: Here is where you can select which report page you would like to work with. Each page has a limited work area where we can use visuals, so it is common to have more than one page in a Power BI report.
9. Add Report page: By selecting this symbol, you can add a new report page to add more area in which we can add visuals.

It is important to note that when working with Visual level filters, the Fields area, and the Format area, you must have the specific visual selected. You can verify this when you see the various anchor points around the visual in question. Now that we have familiarized ourselves with the Report page features and layout, its time to start visualizing!

Visuals for filtering

Filtering the data that users will see within a Power BI report is the most effective way to answer very specific questions about that data, and there are many ways to accomplish this. One of Power BI's best features is its default capability to allow users to interact with a visual, which will then apply that as a filter to the rest of the visuals on that page, and this is known as interactive filtering. This behavior really puts the power into the users hands, and they can decide how they want to filter the visuals. This now makes a report so much more robust because it can answer so many more questions about the data. Along with this functionality, we, report developers, can add more explicit forms of filtering using the Slicer visual that is available to us in the visuals area. This allows us to choose a very specific field from our data, that we know our end users will want to manipulate to see that data in various different states. So now, lets dive in and get a better understanding on these two filtering options, as they will most definitely be elements we will see in our finished reports.

Interactive filtering

Almost every single visual that is readily available to us within Power BI has some sort of element that users can interact with. At the same time, every visual can be impacted by these very same elements. This really gives us a lot of room when it comes to deciding which visuals we would like in a report page. We will cover Interactive filtering again later on in this chapter, but it is important to understand how this feature works so that we can leverage it throughout the following examples. Let's create two very simple visuals based off our current data model so we can see exactly how this interactive filtering works. For right now, let's not worry about the details of these visuals as they will be fully described in later sections of this chapter.

Let's look at, setting up the example:

1. Select the Stacked Column Chart visual that will appear in the report canvas. Make sure you can see the anchor points we talked about earlier so that the following steps will work.
2. Now, let's add a couple of fields to the visual. In the Fields pane under the Internet Sales table, choose the Total Sales calculated measure by placing a check in the box to the left. You will notice that the field shows up under the Value section of the Field area.

3. Do the same thing for the Sales Territory Country field located under the Sales Territory table. This time, the field shows up under the Axis section of the Field area. Reference figure 5-3 here to validate...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Getting Started with Importing Data Options
• Data Transformation Strategies
• Building the Data Model
• Leveraging DAX
• Visualizing Data
• Digital Storytelling with Power BI
• Using a Cloud Deployment with the Power BI Service
• On-Premises Solutions with Power BI Report Server
• Other Books You May Enjoy