We have already introduced the core concepts of Power BI, such as reports, dashboards, and workspaces. Now, let's see how these elements can be used in a common business scenario. For example, managers often want to see how their salespeople are performing. It is not uncommon for a manager to ask for their latest sales and profit figures by the end of the day. Many people keep this information in an Excel spreadsheet on their computer. In the past, it could take several hours or even days to format this data in a way that a manager could easily understand.
Power BI makes it easy to create and share dashboards with managers. You can connect to a data source, such as an Excel spreadsheet on your laptop, and then build a dashboard using the drag-and-drop interface. The process for building and sharing dashboards is the same regardless of the data source you use.
The following steps are followed to create a dashboard:
-Prepare your data: Preparing the data ensures that it's in a format that Power BI can easily consume.
-Build a report: The report contains the visuals that you want to include in your dashboard. Depending on the scenario, reports can be built in either Power BI Desktop or using the Power BI Service
-Pin the report visuals to a dashboard: Dashboards are the primary element that users use for viewing data. They can include data from multiple reports as needed.
-Share a link to the dashboard: Any users with the link and the necessary permissions are easily able to view and interact with the data.
Prepare the data
Before you can start using Power BI, you need to make sure that your data is ready to be consumed. This may involve cleaning and transforming the data using Power Query. If you are connecting to an Excel spreadsheet, the data should be in a flat table with the correct data types in each column. The spreadsheet should also have a header row but no rows or columns that contain totals. Total operations will be calculated in Power BI when you create the visuals.
You can see that there's a header column, and each column has the correct data type associated with the data.
Upload your data to the Power BI service
The Power BI service is where you can create reports that connect to your data sources, such as Excel files on your computer. You can attach a dataset with a few simple clicks, and Power BI will create a blank dashboard where you can place visuals later.
The image shows the completed Financial Sample dataset and the blank dashboard that was created when we attached it to the dataset.
Create Report
Once you have connected to your data, you can either create a new report or edit an existing one. You can start editing the report by using the editing view. The Visualizations, Filters, and Fields panes are located on the right side of the screen. The Fields pane displays the data from your Excel workbook table. The top of the pane shows the name of the table, which is "financials." Under that, Power BI lists the column headings as individual fields.
You can use different visualizations to display the data in your report. The visualizations that you add to the report will depend on the data that you want to communicate. In the image, multiple bar charts are being used to showcase the number of units being sold. Additionally, a map control is included to show sales volumes per country/region.
Pin to dashboard
Once you have created your reports and added visualizations to them, you can build a dashboard. Dashboards are easy to build because they are simply a collection of visualizations from your reports. In the image, we are pinning the Profit by Date visualization from our report to a dashboard.
Since dashboards can have visuals from multiple reports, it makes it easy to have very detailed dashboards that include data from multiple data sources, even if some of those data sources might be unrelated.
SWETA SARANGI