Introduction
This article will explain the options available in Power BI and how to use them to create reports and dashboards. Additionally, it will reveal how to create reports and dashboards using Power BI with an illustration. Furthermore, it explains simple steps to get started with Power BI desktop for beginners.
Power BI has a plethora of features or options to design and format reports, dashboards and represent data in graphical view. Additionally, Power BI has user friendly drag and drop options to design reports and dashboards within a short time. User feels comfortable to use and manage the reports and dashboard using Power BI hence it is mostly used as a reporting tool. Using it we can graphically represent data and provide user business intelligence with less effort which makes a designer’s life easier.
Options
There are many options available in Power BI. We can use those according to our design need. However, mainly I will introduce and represent screen shots for Insert and Visualization in this blog. In visualization we can represent data in the form of bar chart, pie chart, line chart, table, matrix, scatter plot and many more as illustrated in below picture.
Whereas, from Insert option in the top bar we can use TextBox, Button, Shapes, Images, New visuals, More Visuals and so on.
New Visuals
It inserts a Bar graph by default. We can upload custom file as well as import visuals from other source apps.
Fields
Fields is another option available in Power BI. Fields in our design can be added from this option which is available below the Visualizations. It is used to format and represent which data and level should be reflected in which position in our graph, bar, or chart. Based on these field selections, our data will be represented visually in the design. We can easily drag and drop our column to this field.
Formats
Report design format such as background color, font size, font color, font family, alignment, title and many more options for formatting are available under this section. Page design can be done from the below screen; however, for specific design: pie, bar, table scatter plot, donut etc. can be done by selecting particular items one at a time and then going to format section and choosing style of your choice.
For more information, I will start with design demonstration
Pie Chart
In Power BI we can visualize data in several forms; however, I will demonstrate in Pie chart, Bar graph and Tabular form.
To add Pie chart, select pie from visualizations area and pie will be inserted into body of your page.
We can get options for Legends, Values, details below the Visualizations as depicted below.
In my chart I want to visualize the number of employees in each branch inside pie. So, I am going to drag the sum of Ids in Values field and Branch to Legend so that we will get number of employees in each Branch.
To rename the title of chat, just right click on values and click on rename and give the name of the chart.
Clustered Column Chart
Go to Visualization select chart of your choice. Here in this demo I am selecting clustered column chart.
Drag the Field on Legend and Value for which you want to show data in your clustered column chart. For my report, I have selected Total count of Id in Value field and Branch in Legend field so that the number of employees in each branch will be depicted in the chart as shown in the below picture.
Renaming the field: To rename the title of chart right click on value field and click on rename and give a name.
After renaming my chart it becomes as shown below.
Finally, our dashboard looks like as depicted below.
Conclusion
This article has described the different options available in Power BI Desktop shortly and demonstrated how to create pie and column chart in dashboard using Power BI with an example. After going through this article the reader will get basic information on how to use power BI desktop. Furthermore, the reader will be able to design a dashboard with Pie and Column charts. In the next part, we will explore more about other designs.