Introduction To Power BI

What do you understand with Power BI?

When you can define any kind of data to communicate its meaning, that’s where Power Bi comes to the picture. The data can correlate to any customer or any employee, Power BI has the capability to showcase these data in the form of visuals.

Microsoft Power BI is basically a collection of software services, apps, and several connectors that all work together to turn your data into visually immersive and interactive insights.

The data source for Power BI can be in the form of a Microsoft Excel workbook or cloud base database or any on premise hybrid data warehouse. Power BI helps you to connect your provided data source, clean and able to model your data without affecting the underlying source, and share that with everyone.

Power BI basically consists of Microsoft Windows Desktop application called Power BI Desktop and it is an online SaaS (Software as a service).

You can download the Power Bi Desktop application from here.

Mobile Power BI apps are also available on phones and tablets which you can download from the play store.

Power BI has 3 elements - Desktop, service, and Mobile apps. These 3 are primarily designed to let people create, share and consume their business insights or data in the way that serves them, most effectively.

Once you have installed Power BI Desktop Application it will look like this,

Workspaces

Workspaces are kind of containers for your dashboards, reports, data flows, and datasets in Power BI. You can see there are two types of workspaces

1. My workspace
2. Workspaces

My workspaces

My workspace is your personal workspace to which only you have access. But you can still share complete dashboards and reports from your My workspace. If you want to work in a collaborative way like you want to collaborate on dashboards or reports of anyone then you have to work in a workspace (another type).

Workspaces

Workspaces are mainly used for collaboration. Majorly it is used to collaborate and share content with colleagues. It has option to add your colleagues to your workspaces and collaborate on dashboards, reports, and datasets. All members need Power BI pro license in this case.

Datasets

Datasets is a collection of data that you import or connect to Power BI and it helps you to connect and import all sorts of data sets and bring together everything in one place.

Datasets are associated with workspaces and single data set can be possibly part of many workspaces.

If you want to see the datasets in the workspace then the associated datasets are listed under DataSets tab.