Power BI Tutorial For Beginners

Power BI Tutorial covers all basic things required by a beginner to start off their learning in Power BI data visualization. This is tutorial mainly covers the audience who are just beginners, and this tutorial will start from scratch, so beginners can learn without any confusion. Power BI tutorial assumes you are a regular user of MS Excel, and you know advanced excel formulas and concepts of excel.

What is a Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence tool used for data visualization with various available visualizations. This will convert the raw data into meaningful insights and provide beautiful dashboards for our data.

Power BI comes with a free of cost for the “Desktop” version. Apart from the desktop version, you can also try “Service Based” (SAAS) and mobile supporting app as well.

You will learn all the fundamental techniques of the Power BI visualization tool in this Power BI Desktop Tutorial for Beginners.

Why use Power BI?

Power BI Desktop has a lot of new features and if you are a professional who works with data, then below are the reasons why you need to learn Power BI.

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One of the best visualization tools available in the market as of now.
Built-in visualization tools and dashboards.
The combination of excel and power bi are better together.
You can schedule data refreshing time if the data uploaded to Power BI is offline, and if the data source is online, it will refresh automatically.
Power BI desktop is the development of Power View.

Where to Get?

Power BI Desktop is available on the Microsoft website. You can download the software from the below link.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/

Note: Before you download, please verify whether your excel is 32 bit or 64 bit, and you need to install the same version as you have for excel.

Getting Started with Power BI Desktop

After successfully installing the Power BI Desktop, go to search box and type Power BI in your operating system, as shown below, and click on the Power BI Desktop to open your first ever Power BI file.

Now Power BI will take some time for loading, and you will see the initializing model like the below one.

Finally, you will see a window like this.

As of now, cancel the registration or sign-in window, and now you can see a complete Power BI file like this.

Power BI Desktop User Interface

Now let’s comprehend the Power BI user interface of this Power BI Desktop tutorial.

In the above window, we can see four tabs at the ribbon, i.e., “Home, View, Modelling, and Help.”

These are menu options like how we have in our excel workbook. We will see each option under each ribbon in the later stages of our articles on Power BI.

In the working area of the Power Bi desktop view, we can see three icons on the left side of the screen.

By default, we can see the “Report” workspace.

In this workspace, we create all the visualizations of our data. Next below the Report tab is the “Data” tab, and this where we will see our uploaded data table information.

In the last tab, we can see the relationship between two or more data tables (if more than one data table uploaded).

Now comes to the right-hand side of the page, here we have “Visualizations and Fields.”

Using all the above visualization, we can create reports and dashboards from the “Fields.” Fields are nothing but our uploaded data table column headings.

How to Upload Data to Power BI Desktop?

Now we have seen the user interface of the Power BI Desktop window. Now in this power bi desktop tutorial, we will also learn how to upload the data to power bi.

To upload the data to Power BI, first, we need to keep the data ready in one of the below file extensions.

Excel, Text / CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, etc…

Now I have prepared this sample data set in Excel.

Now to upload this data to Power Bi, go to the “Home” tab and click on the “Get Data” drop-down list.

As you can see above, we have so many data source options. Based on your data source, you can choose any one of the above. Since I have my data in excel format, I will choose the same.
Now it will ask you to choose the file from the desired file location in your computer, go to the file saved folder and choose the file.

Click on “Open” to upload the data.
Now you can see the “Navigator” window, this is where we can edit our data using Power Query, or else we can just upload the data as it is.

As you can see above, first, I have selected the worksheet name (Sales Data) where our data resides.
At the bottom, you can see the “Load” and “Transform Data” option. If you wish to edit the data set, then you can choose “Transform Data,” or else you can simply click on the “Load” option.
Now under the “Data” option, we can see our data as shown below.

How to Create Visualizations for Uploaded Data?

Once the data is uploaded, we can create a visualization for our uploaded data. Under “Fields,” we can see all our data headings.

Now for an example, if you want to create total sales numbers overall, then choose “Card” visualization.

Now under “Fields,” click on “Sales” heading to see total sales numbers in the card.

Now similarly, if you want to see “City-wise” visualization, then choose a clustered column chart as a visualization icon and click on “City” for the “Axis” label and “Sales” for the “Value” field.

Like this, you can play around with all the visuals and create your dashboard.

Final Thoughts

Power BI is free software. You can download it from the Microsoft website.
Power BI version should be as per your excel compatibility of either 64 bit or 32 bit.
Make sure data is ready to upload the data to Power BI.

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Power Bi Tutorial