#7 Data Science 👩‍💻 | Introduction to PowerBI and Get started with PowerBI, Prepare data for analysis and Model data in Power BI

Power BI

Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.

Power BI Flow

Generally, the flow starts at the Power BI Desktop, where a report is created. This created report can be published to the Power BI Service and finally shared so that the users can use it from the Mobile apps.

This is the most common approach for sharing reports. There are other approaches but we will stick to this flow for this entire tutorial to help learn the different aspects of Power BI.

How to use Power BI

The common flow of activity in Power BI looks like this:

1. Bring data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report.
2. Publish to the Power BI service, where you can create new visualizations or build dashboards.
3. Share dashboards with others, especially people who are on the go.
4. View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in Power BI Mobile apps.

Building blocks of Power BI

The basic building blocks in Power BI are:

• Visualizations : A visualization is a representation of data in a visual format. It could be a line chart, a bar graph, a color coded map or any visual way to present the data.
• Datasets : A datasets is a collection of data that Power BI uses to create its visualizations. You can have a simple datasets that’s based on a single table from a Microsoft Excel workbook, similar to what’s shown in the following image.
• Reports : a Report is a collection of visualizations that appear together on one or more pages. A report in Power BI is a collection of items that are related to each other. We will be working with the gap minder data to create the report below that looks at the GDP, population and life expectancy by global regions.
• Dashboards : A Power BI dashboard is a collection of visuals from a single page that you can share with others. Often it is a selected group of visuals that provide quick insight into the data or story you are trying to present.

Let’s get started with Power BI

1. Load the data in Power BI

Load data from Excel file

Click the table button to see the dataset in table format.

You can modify data according to your need.

Data from the excel

Preparing the data for analysis,

select the Item name column and change the type from text to binary

When you click on the model, you can see the table name and details of table in model section.

So, That’s all for introduction of Power BI. See the next blog to create the simple dashboard in Power BI. Hope you like it.

Thank You!!