Introduction to Power BI

Question 1

What is Power BI?

Answer 1

turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, clean, and model your data without affecting the underlying source, visualize (or discover) what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Question 2

Reports vs Dashboards

Answer 2

A Power BI dashboard is a single page, a feature of the Power BI service only (not available in desktop), that is comprised of tiles. ​Can’t filter or slice.

​A Power BI report is a multi-perspective view into a dataset, with visuals that represent different findings and insights from that dataset.

Question 3

Power BI desktop vs. Service

Answer 3

Power BI Desktop is a complete data analysis and report creation tool that you install for free application on your local computer. It includes the Query Editor, in which you can connect to many different sources of data and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model. Then you design a report based on that data model. ​
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The Power BI service is a cloud-based service. It supports light report editing and collaboration for teams and organizations. You can connect to data sources in the Power BI service, too, but modeling is limited.​

Most report designers who work on business intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create reports, and then use the Power BI service to distribute their reports with others.

Question 4

Sharing

Datasets, reports or DBs
Workspaces
Power BI app
Embedded
Publish to Web

Answer 4

Datasets, reports, or dashboards: you can share content individually​

Workspaces: With a workspace, you can share as many as items you have in that workspace at once. You can also decide the access level of the workspace to be either Edit, or Read-Only. ​

Power BI App: A Power BI App is the solution for multiple environment approach. With Power BI App, your development environment (workspace), and user environment (App) are isolated from each other.​

Embed in SPO or web site: This method is secure, and you can share the report only with Power BI users you want.​
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Publish to Web: If you don’t require security, you can share a URL to a publicly accessible version of your dashboard

Question 5

Connecting to data: Power Query editor

Answer 5

Use Power Query Editor to connect to one or many data sources, shape and transform the data to meet your needs, then load that model into Power BI Desktop​

​Example: you connect to one source for store data, and one source for transaction data – you can merge the queries to include the store name in the transaction ​