1. Introduction to Power BI
Hi, I'm Iason, and I will be one of your instructors for this Introduction to Power BI course. We'll cover the basics of Power BI and have you making reports before you know it!
2. What is Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a tool that helps organize and visualize data from different sources. It lets you connect to data, clean and structure it, create visualizations, and easily share your findings with others.
3. Data Visualization in Power BI
Visually representing data lets people interpret and analyze data faster. For example, it's easier to find the most profitable year in a bar plot than scrolling through a spreadsheet!
4. Why Power BI?
There are several tools for business intelligence, so why Power BI?
According to Gartner, Power BI is the leading BI tool. Over 97% of Fortune 500 companies use Power BI. In total, Power BI has over six million customers.
With so many companies around the world using Power BI learning and mastering this BI tool can help you progress in your data-related career.
Are you convinced yet? Let's learn more!
5. Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is a key component of Power BI, used for data analysis and report creation on your local computer. It includes features like the Query Editor and is free to download. We'll be using Power BI Desktop in this course.
Paid licenses, such as Power BI Pro, allow publishing to Power BI Service and collaborating with other users.
Although we're using the free version, everything in this course applies to the paid version as well.
6. Power BI Service
Another key component is Power BI service, the cloud version of Power BI. In order to experience the full benefits of Power BI Service, a license is required. The main purpose of Power BI service is to share and distribute reports.
You will often use Power BI Desktop to create a report and Power BI service to share that report.
7. Power BI Interface - Four views
Let's quickly review some key areas of the Power BI interface.
Once a new Power BI Desktop window is opened, we will see the left-side icons for the four views.
8. Power BI Interface - Four views
Report, Table, Model, and DAX Query. You can change views by selecting any of the icons.
9. Power BI Interface - Canvas area
The canvas area in the middle of the report view is where visualizations are created and arranged.
10. Power BI Interface - Filters pane
In the Filters pane you can filter data visualizations.
11. Power BI Interface - Visualizations pane
In the Visualizations pane you can add, change, or customize visualizations.
12. Power BI Interface - Data pane
Finally, the Data pane shows the available fields. You can drag these fields onto the canvas, the Filters pane, or the Visualizations pane to create or modify visualizations.
13. Wide World Importers (WWI) dataset
In this chapter, we'll be using data from a fictional company called Wide World Importers, a wholesale novelty goods importer and distributor operating from San Francisco.
14. Wide World Importers (WWI) dataset
World Wide Importers has provided several data files, typical when dealing with real-life data.
All sales data is in the FactSales file, also known as a fact table, as they contain events or facts related to company activity.
Additional files contain dimension table data, like DimCustomer, which stores customer contact information.
You can create relationships between tables through matching columns so Power BI knows they are related.
15. Let's practice!
Let's load these fact and dimension tables and see what we can make!