Introduction
In this article, you will learn what are the building blocks of Microsoft Power BI, why Power BI, and the family of Power BI. Let’s start this article, have a look at these basic building blocks, and learn how to build some simple things with them. We will have a brief look at how complex things can also be produced. Before learning the building blocks of Power BI, first, we must understand the term building blocks.
Building Blocks
Building Blocks are the collection, package, or combination of the things or functionality that are put together in a set of manner to make something exist. This is a group of essential things on which a large product is based. For example, water, fat, and protein are the building blocks of the human body.
Building Block of Power BI
The basic building blocks of Power BI are the following:
- Visualizations
- Datasets
- Reports
- Dashboards
Visualizations
Visualization means the visual representation of data. Live dashboards, interactive reports, maps, graphs, and other visual representations allow you to easily and efficiently access the main business insight. Power BI gives you different visualization types, which keep getting updated with time. Some commonly used visualizations methods are as follows:
- Pie chart
- Donut Chart
- Funnel
- Line chart
- Area chart
- Stacked column chart
Datasets
Dataset is a collection of data. A dataset is required to transfer data into information. Through datasets, you can create interactive reports and dashboards.
Datasets can also be a combination of different kinds of data sources like CSV, EXCEL, SQL Server, web, or many more. A dataset contains the data source and its credentials.
Once you have Datasets, you can start creating a visualization that can display different parts of datasets in different ways.
Reports
A Power BI report is a visual representation of a dataset, use for a multi-perspective view with images from the dataset reflecting various observations and insights. A report may have a single visual, or multiple visual pages. You could be someone who designs reports, depending on your job role.
Dashboard
Power BI dashboards are a collection of visuals that compose, store, and show significant data from different information sources into one, easy-to-access place. You can share dashboards with others. The dashboard must fit on a single page. It works like a blank canvas where you can put your visualizations.
Why Power BI?
These are the top 5 reasons you should consider using Microsoft Power BI.
Easy to use
Microsoft Power BI is so easy to transform data into important representations rapidly. Microsoft Power BI makes this conceivable by the intuitive arrangement of making visuals, pick the visual, pick the data you need in it. You may get a report or dashboard going in minutes after import your data.
Easy to share
You may easily share your dashboard and reports created by Power BI.
Easy to understand
Natural language can be used to interact with your data when you publish it to the Microsoft Power BI service.
The reason it’s called POWER BI
It’s a powerful tool for both modeling and visualizing data. You can perform Power Query, DAX functionality to start making calculated columns, measures and there is no need to learn any new language to shaping your data before you import it.
It’s everywhere
When you have a created dashboard, you can get to it from just about anything. The web app is able for both showing and altering reports from the desktop. The iOS and Android apps permit you to utilize your reports in a hurry. Microsoft Power BI Desktop is for those having features to write a book, they can model, transform, and visualize their data to their heart’s content.
Family of Power BI
Power BI consists of:
- Power BI Desktop
- Power BI Service
- Power BI Mobile Apps
![Building Blocks Of Power BI]()
Reference:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/media/power-bi-overview/power-bi-overview-blocks.png
Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is a free windows application provided by Microsoft that you can easily install on your personal computer that lets you connect to, transform, and visualize your data. Using Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple different sources of data, and combine them into a data model. For more info, click on the below link:
On the left side of this tool, you can see three kinds of views (highlighted with red color) in the below manner:
- Report
Here you can spend your most of the time to create reports and visuals
- Data
Here you can see tables, measures and other data sources for the report
- Model
Here you can manage the relationship among tables
At the home page click on Get Data, now you can get the data from different sources, as shown in the below image:
Similarly, this tool has the ‘Insert’ tab, ‘Modeling’ tab, ‘View’ tab, etc. for inserting more features like ‘text box’, add visuals, and many more.
Power BI Services
The Power BI service is a cloud-based business analytics and data visualization service sometimes referred to as Power BI online. This is is the SaaS (Software as a Service) part of Power BI. Power BI service enables you to visualize and analyze data with speed and efficiency.
Power BI Mobile
Power BI gives a set of mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices. In mobile apps, you can connect and interact with your cloud and on-premises data. With Power BI app you get mobile access to your business information stored in your Office 365 account.
Conclusion
I hope you understand all the above terms of Power BI and you are now able to install Power BI desktop in your PC. Stay with me for learning more on how to use Power BI.