From spreadsheets to dashboards
Many businesses already have the data they need to make better decisions: sales exports, stock lists, expense sheets. The problem is that the data is scattered and the reports are rebuilt by hand every month. Power BI connects to that data, cleans it once, and turns it into interactive reports that refresh themselves.
The three parts of Power BI
- Power BI Desktop: the free Windows application where you build reports. This is where most of this course happens.
- The Power BI service: the website where reports are published, shared and refreshed on a schedule.
- Mobile apps: for viewing published reports on a phone.
A tour of Desktop
When you open Power BI Desktop you will see:
- The ribbon at the top, with Get data, Transform data and Publish.
- Three views on the left: Report (the canvas where you build visuals), Table (see the data) and Model (see how tables relate).
- The Visualizations pane on the right, where you choose chart types.
- The Data pane, listing your tables and fields.
- The Filters pane, for filtering a visual, a page or the whole report.
Your first report
- Click Get data, choose Excel workbook, and open the sample sales file.
- Tick the Sales table and click Load.
- In the Report view, click the Card visual and drag Amount into it. You now see total sales.
- Click an empty space, choose a Clustered column chart, and drag Month to the X axis and Amount to the Y axis.
- Add a Slicer and drag Branch into it. Click a branch and watch every visual filter.
That interactivity, where one click filters everything, is the heart of Power BI.
Save your work
Save the file as a .pbix. It holds the data connections, the cleaning steps, the model and the report together.
How this course builds up
We go in the order real projects follow:
- Getting data in and cleaning it so refresh keeps working.
- Modelling, so totals are correct.
- DAX measures for the calculations managers ask for.
- Design and publishing, so people actually use the report.
What this means for you
By the end, you will build a dashboard that answers a real business question and updates itself, replacing hours of manual reporting every month.
