In Data We Trust: Power BI Capabilities

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight

From fetching data and numbers to analyzing information it contains. Say hello to Power BI capabilities.
Power BI offers basic data wrangling capabilities, as it lets you create interactive visualizations, reports, and dashboards, with a few clicks or drag-and-drop; type natural-language questions about your data on a dashboard.

It can work with dozens of data types –

With Power BI, an IT professional can :

• Focus on what they love -Data, and provide quality and authoritative datasets to end users, business analysts and data scientists
• Meet the growing business need for consumable data
• Spend less time on infrastructure maintenance or report development
• Focus on increasing demand for real-time and streaming data sources
• Implement data governance and data-level security for cloud and on -premise data sources

Steps to Create Reports

• Import Data from the source

To import new data, click the Get Data button on the Home tab, choose your data source type and click connect.

This will bring up a familiar Windows file-selection dialog. Choose your file and you'll see a preview of your data. If it looks okay and there's nothing more you want to do to the data before starting to graph and chart, hit Load

Query Editor

Otherwise, click Edit, which brings up the Power BI Query Editor.
Query Editor lets you reshape and transform data by, for example, merging multiple data sources and pivoting or un-pivoting data. It can also handle common data drudgery like adding, deleting, renaming and moving columns.
Close out of the Query Editor with Close & Apply to get back to the main Power BI application. (Because these files are so large, this may take a little while Your Power BI blank canvas should look something like this:

• Here, you can also configure the properties of each visualization. On the right are two panes: Visualizations and Fields. The Visualizations pane offers the entire set of available visualizations at the top; the bottom section presents filtering options. The Fields pane contains the list of all the fields of your dataset.
• To create a report, select the fields or drag to panel that you want to appear in the report.
• As you will discover, each visualization offers a different insight from the same numbers. With Power BI you can use different visualizations to find the best way to tell a story about your data, using the same numbers.

PowerBI Automatically creates Visualization by calculating the data in the columns that is selected.

Filtering a report

Visual interactions are useful, but they come with some limitations:

• The filter is not saved as part of the report. Whenever you open a report, you can begin to play with visual filters but there is no way to store the filter in the saved report.
• The filter is always visible. Sometimes you want a filter for the entire report, but you do not want any visual indication of the filter being applied. In other words, you want something like a hidden filter working in the background on the full page or report.

Power BI offers you a different way of filtering data. They are the standard filters and they can be applied to three different layers:

• Visual-level filters Visual-level filters work on only an individual visualization, reducing the amount of data that the visualization can see. Moreover, visual-level filters can filter both data and calculations.
• Page-level filters Page-level filters work at the report-page level. Different pages in the same report can have different page-level filters.
• Report-level filters: A report-level filter works on the entire report, filtering all pages and visualizations included in the report. You can set all of the filters in the Filters section in the Visualizations pane.

You can configure filters in the same place, in the Filters section of the Visualizations pane. Also, You can drag columns from the Fields in any filter and, when there, you can click them to apply a filter, by simply selecting some values from the list

Data Drill Down

Drill Down is to move from summary information to detailed data by focusing in on something. Drill down is the ability to go from summary level information to a very detailed view of the data;
To drill down the data select appropriate field and add it to Axis field on the Visualization pane. For instance we drill down Sales quantity of a branch on particular day.

You could see the drill down icon appeared on the visualization.

Clicking on particular bar from the Visualization will show the detailed or in-depth report of selected location.

The above image will display the sales quantity on particular date of the location that is drilled down.
Once the report is ready, the report should be accessible to the users. Hence the report has to be published.

Publish to Power BI

When a report is ready to use, the Power BI Desktop file (in PBIX format) may be saved and uploaded to the Power BI service with a single click.
By publishing Power BI Desktop files to Power BI, you can enable end-users to reap the benefits of advanced data preparation and reporting, giving them access to reports that are richer than what they could produce on their own.

Click on the Publish icon from the home menu.

For example, users can pin visualizations from the report directly to their dashboards. Users can load all of the elements of the data model, such as measures and relationships between tables, so they can create visualizations that mix data from any table in the dataset.

Keep in mind that if you send a PBIX file to someone else, you are providing access to the entire contents of the file (a PBIX file contains the data model, queries, and a copy of the dataset). If you want to restrict access to the underlying data, publish the file to Power BI, and provide access only to authorized users. This way, only the right audience can consume information. You can also create custom dashboards and reports directly in Power BI. All you need is a web browser to explore your data.

What are you waiting for? You can start and explore these limitless opportunities with Power BI, big data visualization and intelligent reporting.

Want to know more or have a query, suggestion, feedback? Get in touch, write to us at enquiry@bluepi.in

Till then, more power to you!
Happy Reading!

This blog has been written by Jabaprabhu J.

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Jabaprabhu J , System Administrator

Jaba Prabhu J is an AWS Certified Technical Professional, with 3.5+ years of experience in Cloud Performance Optimization Services, currently working as a System Administrator at BluePi.
key areas of interest include Cloud Computing, Databases, Datawarehouse and Infrastructure-as-a-Code. </div> </div>