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Adam Aspin - Pro Power BI Desktop

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Pro Power BI Desktop
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Adam Aspin
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Apress
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Adam Aspin 2016

Adam Aspin Pro Power BI Desktop 10.1007/978-1-4842-1805-1_1

1. Introduction to Power BI Desktop

Adam Aspin 1

(1)

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this chapter (doi: 10.1007/978-1-4842-1805-1_1 ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

If you are reading this book, it is probably because you need to use data. More specifically, you want to take a journey from data through to insight where quantities of facts and figures need to be shaped into comprehensible information and given clear and visual meaning.

This book is all about that journey. It covers the many ways that you can transform raw data into high-impact analyses using Power BI Desktopthe new self-service business intelligence (BI) application that Microsoft is making freely available. This fresh approach to self-service BI presumes minimal central IT intervention or dependency. It is based on giving the user the ability to use simple yet powerful tools to handle industrial-strength quantities of data and to share stunning output in the shortest possible timescales.

The following are keywords in this universe:

Speed
Delivery
Empowerment
Decentralization
Disintermediation

Once you have mastered the tools and techniques described in this book, you will be able to

Discover, structure, and load your data from a wide range of sources
Add all the calculations you need to enhance information and extract accurate analysis
Create stylish interactive presentations
Share your insights with your colleagues and clients

It follows that this book is written from the perspective of the user. Essentially, it is all about giving users the tools and knowledge to define their own requirements and satisfy their own needs simply and efficiently through developing new and existing skills.

This chapter assumes that you have no prior knowledge of Power BI Desktop or even business intelligence. Consequently, it starts from the very beginning by explaining what exactly self-service business intelligence really is. Then it takes you through the necessary steps to download and install Power BI Desktop. Finally, it takes you on a whirlwind tour of Power BI Desktop, where you see just how quickly and easily you can go from raw data to polished insight with this new and amazing tool.

If you intend to follow the dashboard example that you find in this chapter (and I hope that you will), then you need to download the source material for this book from the Apress web site. Appendix A describes how to do this so that you can prepare the terrain for your upcoming adventure with Power BI Desktop.

The Microsoft Self-Service Business Intelligence Solution

It is important to understand from the start that Microsofts Self-Service Business Intelligence solution is a constantly evolving process. It has been assembled from a series of parallel technologies and it is in a continuous state of flux. Fortunately, this perpetual motion is now at a peak of readiness, and while it is still undergoing some enhancements and revisions, it is ready for immediate use.

So what exactly is Power BI? At its heart, it is a cloud-based service that lets you store and share essential business data in the form of dashboards and reports. However, before you can share dashboards , you need to create themand this is where Power BI Desktop comes in. This easy-to-use tool is completely free. It is used to find, cleanse, and mash up data so that you can then develop telling metrics and deliver them in the form of stylish visualizations. Once your tables, charts, and maps are assembled into reports, you can then share them with a selected audience in Azurethe Microsoft Cloud (should you want to, of course). Yet the good news does not stop there. Your public can view your insights on just about any Windows, iOS, or Android device using the free Power BI apps that Microsoft has made available for these platforms.

So all that you have to do is to create dashboards with Power BI Desktop, share the output in Azure, and then view and interact with the results using the Power BI apps. It really is that simple. Moreover, up to a certain limit on file sizes, it is completely free.

There is moremuch morein the Power BI universe, but this short description will suffice to get you started. In any case, Chapter provides more detail on the way that Power BI Desktop fits into the Microsoft Self-Service Business Intelligence solution. In the meantime, lets move the focus back to Power BI Desktop. To begin, what exactly will you be using this application for? There are three answers:

Import data
Model data
Create dashboards

Lets take a quick look at some of the things that these may entail.

Import Data from Diverse Sources

The first step on the path to delivering concrete business intelligence is to find and import all the data that you need for your analysis. Power BI Desktop lets you

Import data from a wide variety of sources. This covers corporate databases to desktop files, social media to big data.
Merge data from multiple sources and shape it into a coherent structure.
Cleanse your data to make it reliable and easy to use.
Break down the data into the columns and records that suit your requirements.

There was a time when these tasks required dedicated teams of IT specialists. In fact, it was considered so complex that it earned its own acronym, ETL, short for E xtract, T ransform, and L oad. Well, this process no longer needs specialists. With Power BI Desktop, you can mash up your own data so that it is ready to use as part of your self-service BI solution.

Handling data is discussed in Chapters .

Model Your Data

Power BI Desktop is not just a data store for your information. It also lets you extend and develop the cleansed data. More specifically, it allows you to

Create a data model by joining tables to develop a coherent data structure from multiple separate sources of data. This data model is then used in dashboards.
Enrich the data model by applying coherent names and data types.
Create calculations and prepare the core metrics that you want to use in your analyses and presentations.

It is worth noting that you can load data into Power BI Desktop directly without going through the data cleansing and modeling stage. If the source data is already in good shape, then you can start using it straightaway.

Modeling data and adding calculations is discussed in Chapters .

Creating Dashboards and Reports

I think of creating dashboards and reports as the jewel in the crown of self-service business intelligence. A truly dynamic analysis and presentation approach lets you deliver business intelligence composed of

tables
matrixes
charts
maps
gauges
images

and many other types of visualization.

Not only that, but it is incredibly fast and highly intuitive. It provides advanced interactivity so that you and your users can slice and dice" the data on the fly in real time using

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