00:00Power BI is all the craze right now. So in this 10 minute video, let's understand what Power BI
00:05really is and create your very first Power BI report. Let's go. Start by going to powerbi.microsoft.com
00:14and click on the products and click on Power BI Desktop. Download the free desktop application
00:22from Microsoft website and install it. Then open the Power BI Desktop application on your computer
00:29and you will be greeted with a welcome screen like this. You might actually see a login screen as
00:36well. You can cancel that out and then you will come to a page like this. As I have been
00:41using Power BI
00:41for a while, I have got several other files here listed, but you can also close this one out using
00:47that X mark and you will get into Power BI. Power BI is a data analysis and visualization software.
00:56So using Power BI, we can take any kinds of data, whether the data is in an Excel workbook,
01:02a database like SQL Server, or even paste the data directly into Power BI and do the analysis.
01:09To help us understand how to use Power BI, I have made a sample dataset for you. This has just
01:16six
01:16columns and about 1000 rows of data. It is from a fictional company called Awesome Chocolates where
01:24we sell and ship chocolates. So here is the shipment data for the year of 2022 so far. So locate
01:31that
01:32file in the video description below and download the file and then go to Power BI and use the import
01:38data
01:39from Excel button here. Click on it and point to the file that you have downloaded. You will get a
01:47navigator screen asking you what data you want in the spreadsheet. So select the data tab and this is
01:53the data that we want. You can straight away load it but Power BI also gives you an option to
01:59transform
01:59the data. This is helpful if your data is not exactly the way you want or you want to do
02:06a little bit
02:06of data cleanup before doing any analysis. For now let's just load this data. When you load the data,
02:13the screen will change and then now you will get a prompt saying build visuals with your data
02:18and your data will show up here in the fields panel. This is a good time for us to understand
02:23various components of the screen before we make anything within Power BI. The Power BI screen is
02:30divided into three main areas. You have got a ribbon on the top which is useful for accessing
02:36various features of the application. If you have used a tool like Excel or Outlook, the ribbon
02:42functionality is quite similar. You can use the ribbon to switch between different things
02:46and depending on what else you are doing on the screen, some new ribbons may also appear.
02:52The second biggest area is your canvas area. This is denoted with the dotted lines and this is where any
02:58data analysis that you are doing, any visuals or charts or tables will appear. And the third main area
03:05is the right hand side panels. These are the panels that you can use to kind of build stuff or
03:12change
03:12things. So for example, you can use the visualizations panel to insert a graph or customize how that graph
03:19is done. Likewise, the fields panel is useful to accessing any of the data points. Let's just build our
03:25very first chart and then we will go and understand how everything works. If you remember the data, it is
03:30a shipment data. So if I expand the data view, I can see that I have got all of these
03:35columns.
03:36For example, we have a country. So let's just see how many boxes we ship by country. So for something
03:43like that, a column chart is pretty useful. So I will click on the column chart and it will add
03:48a column
03:49chart on the screen. I'm going to move this here and then resize it like that. In this column chart,
03:57you have got X axis and Y axis. X axis is the horizontal thing here and I want to put
04:03country
04:03there. So just drag and drop country into the X axis. Onto the Y axis, we will put boxes shipped
04:11and we will get a number of boxes shipped by each country. As of this data, Australia has the most
04:18boxes shipped and New Zealand has the lowest boxes shipped. And when you create the visual, Power BI
04:23automatically arranges them in the descending order of the data. Let's just say you're very happy with
04:29this, but you don't like the blue color. You can change the color of the visual by selecting the
04:38visual and going to the visualizations area here and clicking on the format your visual option.
04:45From here, you can go to the columns and change the color. Sometimes it is very hard to remember
04:51exactly where everything is. You can also search for color here and all the color options will appear
04:57in the search results. And from that, the blue color is what we want to change. So let's switch this
05:02to
05:02orange and we will get a visual like that. Let's add one more visual. This time I want to see
05:07how things
05:09are happening by individual product. So for that, I'm going to make a bar chart and we will add another
05:15bar chart. When you click on the bar chart, Power BI will put it in any available space on the
05:21canvas and
05:22you can kind of resize it again and move it around as you want. So in this bar chart, we
05:27have got y-axis,
05:28which is the vertical one. And that's where I want to see my product. And onto the x-axis, I
05:35want to see
05:36again boxes shipped. So we'll put that. We'll see all our products listed, one bar per product.
05:44And again, the default coloring is blue. So far, nothing seriously different about how you create
05:51charts from Excel or something else. But here comes the first major difference of Power BI.
05:57If you were now to click on a specific country, for example, Australia, you can see that instantly
06:04all the Australia related boxes shipments by product are highlighted. This is a powerful and default
06:11feature of Power BI. This particular feature is called interaction where every visual is interactive
06:18by default. The interactions go in any direction. So for example, if I pick on eclairs here, I can see
06:26where we are sending eclairs. So for example, eclairs, Canada seems to be one of the biggest countries.
06:31And when you point your mouse on that, Power BI will show you a helpful tooltip there to help you
06:37understand what is going on. To go back to the way visuals are, you can again click on the same
06:42thing
06:42that you highlighted. And that will take you back to the way things are. Apart from columns and bars,
06:47you can use any of the other visuals to analyze the data and see things. For example, if you want
06:53to see
06:53the trend of shipments over a period of time or how many, how much amount we made over a period
06:58of time,
06:59we can use a line chart for that. Let's just make some space for that. So we will add a
07:06line chart.
07:06And in this line chart on the X axis, I'm going to put my date. Now date is a special
07:12type of data
07:13in Power BI. And whenever you use a date, it will create a hierarchy wherein the same date can be
07:19seen
07:20at year, quarter, month or day level. This looks a bit confusing, but let's put Y axis value here and
07:26then we will understand how that works. So let's add amount to the Y axis. We thought we are going
07:31to
07:31get a line, but we just get a single dot. Where is the line? This is because of the date
07:39hierarchy.
07:40And right now Power BI is showing me all the data added up at year level. Whenever there is a
07:46hierarchy
07:46involved, Power BI also shows these extra buttons on the top of the visual to go down different levels.
07:53So if you use this icon, I call this a pitchfork. You can see the data at a quarterly level.
08:04Go down once more and we can see the monthly variations by the amount. So from January,
08:09we started really strong. Then the chocolate sales kind of went down,
08:13picked up again in March, went down and then they kind of went back up again.
08:19So this is how you can use a line graph to visualize things. Let's say you have presented
08:24this chart to your boss and she suddenly asks you, why did the sales drop in the month of February?
08:31You don't have to do further analysis. You can right click on that point and then you can use the
08:36analyze, explain the decrease option so that Power BI can do some artificial intelligence and machine
08:44learning analysis of your data. For example, it analyzed the data and it found some really interesting
08:50things. So I'm going to add one of these. We'll select this visual and then click on that plus button
08:56there to add it to the canvas there. Using this, it tells me that from the month of January to
09:02February,
09:03our amount has gone down because even though milk bars and dark bites had more amount,
09:10these other products had significantly less amounts and that's why everything kind of got pulled down
09:17and we ended up having less amount in the month of February. So these are some of the features that
09:23are available within Power BI for you to analyze the data. Now that we have prepared a page of analysis,
09:30you may want to save this and share it with your colleagues or your clients. To do that, you can
09:36save the Power BI workbook using the save button here or file save. When you save the Power BI file,
09:43it will usually just save in your computer and you can give this file any name.
09:53To share this Power BI with another colleague or a person in your organization, you will now need to
10:00use the publish button. And this is where you will have to log into Power BI in order to be
10:05able to do
10:06that. If you go back to the Microsoft website, you'll see that apart from the free Power BI desktop software,
10:12they also have a pro and a premium package using which you can share and collaborate with others
10:18whenever you do the data analysis. So this is how within large organizations or small organizations,
10:25people use Power BI. They use the pro option or a premium option to create content and share it with
10:32others so that other people can enjoy the reports or files that you have produced. Now that you understand
10:38what Power BI is all about, why not spend a little bit more time learning about it? I've got two
10:43resources for you. Number one is this video where I talk more about Power BI with plenty of examples.
10:50And the second one is my online Power BI course where you can learn how to use Power BI to
10:56solve
10:57many real-world business analysis problems. Check out the course using the card that is shown on the
11:02screen. I'll catch you in one of these places. Bye!
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