Microsoft Power BI Desktop: creating stunning reports and visualisations

Objectives

To learn how to use the new data modeling and visualization capabilities in the Power BI Desktop tool.

Targeted audience

Professionals and technicians

Content

Introduction to Power BI Desktop

• Link between the desktop version and the Power BI service
• Three types of views: reports, data, relationships
• .pbix, .pbit extensions

Acquiring and Transforming Data

• Importing data: from the Web, a file (CSV, Excel, XML, JSON), a database, or a Web service
• Adjusting data in the query editor
• Keeping or removing rows and/or columns
• Specifying data type
• Transforming data
• Filtering data
• Splitting and renaming a column
• Unpivoting data
• Inserting custom columns
• Adding or duplicating a query
• Combining queries: append and merge

Data Modeling

• Power BI Desktop data models
• Defining relationships between tables
• Editing the relationship type (cardinality and direction)
• Building a hierarchy with a series of fields from a table
• Giving hints to the model
• Separation between display and sort for a column (specifying another column for sorting)

Visualizing Data

• Overview of different visualizations
• Textual visualizations: tables, matrices, single-field cards, multi-row cards
• Graphical visualizations: histograms or bar charts, pie and donut charts, line graphs, scatter plots, and bubble charts
• Geospatial visualizations: Bing and ArcGIS maps
• Formatting the report and controlling the layout of elements
• Adding data to a visualization
• Defining and applying filters
• Adding a slicer
• Using visualizations as navigation tools and for drilling into data
• Adding custom visualizations from the Office Store
• Adding an animation by defining a play axis for scatter plots and bubble charts

Quick Overview of Using the Power BI Service

• Difference between the free and paid versions of the Power BI service
• Publishing a report from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI service
• Creating and managing a dashboard
• Adding report tiles to a dashboard
• Sharing dashboards, reports, and tiles