Power BI - Analyze and Interactively Visualize Business Data

Learn how to connect to the data and create an initial Power BI report from this data source.

In practice, you will often access Excel worksheets that you have not created yourself. These data sources often need to be adjusted before they can be smoothly processed in Power BI. (Get data, Data transformation, Excel, Dataset)

When maintaining data, you must ensure that your data is consistent. One concept that helps is "normalization".

Imagine your data comes from an external source and you want to change certain values or descriptions of the fields - this can take weeks. But if you want your report to be ready tomorrow, that's not a good option. Instead, learn to change field names, properties, and even values.

Via the Internet, you have access to enormous amounts of data of all kinds, which can be helpful for your report. Data can include statistical information, stock quotes, weather data, geodata and much more. Learn how to use data from the Internet in Power BI.

You can also use information from PDF files as a data source.

A CSV file (Comma-Separated-Value) is a certain type of text file and can be exported from almost any program, and also imported into almost any program, including Power BI. This gives you a viable alternative if you cannot directly access a data source.

In most companies, customer data, production data, suppliers, etc. are stored in databases. Access serves as an example.

It is now time to elaborate a report. Discover some useful advanced features and extend the report with additional visualizations.

Improve your report even further with more advanced techniques and workflows to increase the informative value and significance.

Learn how to format data and, for example, display numbers as currency and use thousands separators.

The standard automatic axis scaling of diagrams in Power BI, or Excel, can be very tricky. Learn how to set the axis scaling yourself.

You have typically defined target values internally for key figures. It is difficult to display these target values in Excel charts. This is much easier in Power BI.

To make reports and visualizations easier to read, you can insert annotations.

Especially the development of values over certain periods of time, for example the percentage growth of the turnover compared to the previous year's turnover (so-called Year-over-Year developments) can be efficiently calculated and displayed with Power BI.

Learn how to display data on maps. This is not as trivial as it seems at first glance. You must make sure that geoinformation is displayed correctly so that cities do not suddenly become federal states (see Washington and Washington DC as an example).

Tachometers are often used to clearly display values. In Power BI you can also use this intuitively interpretable and well-known representation. (Radial gauge, Minimum value, Maximum value, Target value)

You are probably familiar with the "Conditional Formatting" function from Excel, which allows you to store an additional information level behind your data which allows you to visualize the values in a table, e.g. with data bars. This helpful function is also available, although somewhat hidden, in Power BI.

You can filter the data on a report page by simply clicking on values in a visualization. But what if you want to apply filters or so-called slicers, i.e. data sections to an entire report, or apply complex filters?

Power BI enables you to use your own diagrams and diagrams from external providers. Perhaps you already miss the so-called Sparklines, which you know from Excel? There are hundreds of extensions to explore!

In particular, when you create reports for a company or organization, you often want to use the same colors as on the Web page or in publications such as the annual report. The Marketing Department can provide the color codes you need.

Learn how to use bookmarks to get to certain evaluations much faster and how to present your reports more professionally and fluently.

Previously, you only created reports for the desktop view in this course. But what should you consider if you want to make sure that your reports are also displayed optimally on smartphones and tablets?

You can also access Power BI reports and dashboards from your smartphone, tablet and even your smartwatch.

Learn how to format fields and add additional calculated fields.

In some cases, the data source does not provide all the information you need for optimal evaluation. Especially if you are working with data sources that you have not created yourself. It may be necessary to perform further calculations first, or to extract information from a field.

Quick measures are a tried and tested way to add complex calculations to your presentations without having to familiarize yourself with the DAX formula language.

A measure is a newly created virtual column. Measures, like Quickmeasures, do not require disk space and they are calculated faster than reading data from a storage device.

Get to know the user interface of the Power BI Service, discover elements that you already know from the desktop version and elements that are exclusively contained in the Power BI Service.

If you have not yet activated the Power BI Service, please follow the instructions in the chapter Appendix: The Various Power BI Components and how to Install Power BI.

Your first report is now available, and you want to share it with others in order to analyze the data together, draw conclusions, define concrete goals and, building on this, derive the right measures.

Another way to publish Power BI reports is through Microsoft Teams. You can quickly and easily tab reports and dashboards from Power BI and then access them from within the Teams environment.

Do you want to make all data from your reports visible to all users or do you prefer to make some restrictions?

Learn how dashboards can help you hide the complexity of a report and focus on the very important data.

You can be notified by Power BI as soon as your predefined target values are exceeded or fallen short of. Alsolearn about two workarounds to eliminate the disadvantage that changes have to be made by individual users.

Reports and dashboards are not something you create on your own. When you work with multiple people, it is important to find the best solution for organizing the collaboration.

Using a gateway, organizations can leave databases and other data sources on their own networks, but still securely use this local data in cloud services such as Power BI Service.

Learn more about advanced settings that you can use to optimize the functionality and appearance of the various Power BI elements.

Power BI is offered in different versions. The installation is quite simple. If the application has already been installed by your IT department, you are welcome to skip this tutorial.

By default, the Power BI service does not appear in the list of applications in Office 365.

Power BI is constantly being further developed. To stay up to date, you can use the Help function in the navigation bar to access news in various blogs and Microsoft trainings, or you can send suggestions for new features directly to Microsoft.