The Power BI Starter Pack

This first series has barely scratched the surface of the subject of Power BI. Aims to give you a basic overview and a solid understanding of the Power BI concept.

Precious is known to be the manager of a Lafarge Distributing Company that sells two different types of cement for construction through several retail shops and websites. Apparently, she was assigned to monitor the sales stock of each of the outlets from which she was to convey the progress of the outlets and the rate at which sales were being made.

As of December 2019, the director requested to know the best selling products between the two types of cement to make the following year’s budget for each of the outlets. Precious then decided to make visualizations based on market insights to show her boss. Most times, she had a Microsoft Excel Workbook containing the relevant data and a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to share the results of each product varying across different outlets. However, Precious heard about the advantages of Power BI service for building a rather sophisticated visualization.

The above scenario illustrates a case example of what Power BI can be used for.

What is Power BI

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connections that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. You can connect disparate datasets, transform, clear the data into a data model, and create charts or graphs to provide visuals for the data.

Your data may be an excel spreadsheet, collection of cloud-based, and on-premises hybrid data warehouse.

History of Power BI

In 2016, Microsoft started a secret project under the code-named “Gemini”. Project Gemini basically, took the power of SQL Server Analysis Service(SSAS) and made it available in an in-memory engine. Gemini was renamed “Power Pivot in 2009" and released as a free Excel add-in from Microsoft.

In 2010, Power Pivot began to gain traction with the help of Rob Collie’s blog because he targeted the large population of Excel people, not the smaller part of SQL Server. Power View was released as a part of the SharePoint. Microsoft had the intention to compete with the incredible visualization offered by Tableau in 2012, but Power View was not really that great.

Later in 2013, Power Query was released with the goal to make it easier to access data and bring it into PowerPoint. Power Query and Power Pivot were available as Excel add-ins but the problem Microsoft encountered was that they had to email Excel files (mostly very large) to anyone who wanted to use it. They also had a crisis of not being able to automatically schedule data to refresh.

In 2015, Power BI that could be accessed at PowerBI.com was announced by Microsoft. It illuminated the vague Power Pivot and SharePoint. Power BI exited the hidden place and entered general availability. It’s seen to be a SAAS solution that delivers information to your web browser and to your phone in a limited duration.

Why Power BI?

It’s described as a data visualization and a calculation engine. It’s one of the leading tools in the market and there are many reasons for choosing Power BI solution.

• Data search and exploration: With Power BI, you have the ability to carry out the analysis of your data by asking it questions, in plain English(no special code or syntax is required). The process is called Natural-Language Queries and with it, you can use Power BI to perform tasks in much the same way you ask one of your colleagues.

• Stay-up-to-date anywhere you are: Since the application is located in the cloud, all authorized users can access the reports from all types of devices, and from anywhere they are. You can thus monitor your data in real-time and receive notifications on your mobile phone or tablet when the data continuously changes and thus, always be updated and informed.
• Smart and new insights into your data: It’s a visually innovative reporting tool with the interactive dashboard. You will visualize your data real-time in 360-degree perspective. The main new functionality which among other things allows integration of external data.
• User-friendly mobility: with intuitive tools, you can explore the underlying data, which makes it easy to find exactly the engine you need.

Power BI Versions

Power BI has three(3) pricing pages.

Power BI Desktop: free single-user software that gives room for data cleaning and preparation, custom visualization, and the ability to publish to the Power BI service.

You can connect various data sources with the help of the desktop and combine the data into a data model. This data model allows you to create a collection of images and graphics that make you share the information within the organization as records. The majority of the users who work on Business Intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create and share their reports with others.

Power BI Pro: The pro plan costs $9.99/user/month. It includes data collection, data governance, building dashboards, and publish reports across the web apps and software.

Power BI Premium: The premium plan starts at $4.995 a month per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource.

Power BI Architecture

Before using the Power BI service and features, you should know about the architecture of Power BI, how the services are being used to transform, create reports, and dashboard.

• Data Integration: Data is extracted from different servers which can be different servers or databases. The data from different sources can be in various types of formats. When you import the file into the Power BI, it compresses the data up to 1 GB, and it uses a direct query.
• Data Transforming: Integrated data is not ready to be visualized because the data needs to be transformed. To transform the data, it should be cleaned or preprocessed. For instance, missing values or duplicates can be removed from the dataset. After this, it’s then loaded into the data warehouse.
• Report and Publish: Reports are the visualization of the data in the form of the slicer, graphs, charts, maps. Power BI offers a lot of visualization to create the report. After which you publish into Power BI Server, on-premises Power BI Server.
• Creating a Dashboard: You can create a dashboard after publishing the report by holding the individual element. The visuals retain the filters when the report is holding the individual elements to save the reports. Pinning the live report page allows the dashboard users to interact with the visually selecting slicer and filter.

Installing Power BI

For a beginner who doesn’t know anything about the new Power BI service. They most likely visit the Power BI website to make a download.

This pops up on the screen illustrating the official welcome page of Power BI. As with any web page for sharing tasks and dashboards, the dropping of credentials is way very essential. But to get started with Power BI, all you need is a valid work email address.

Getting to realize this isn’t the real downloading process after signing up and a whole while of wobbling through the website can be very frustrating as it’s just a way of working directly through the portal.

The download can be started in two different ways. Visiting the Power BI desktop webpage and clicking on the download button or clicking the download button located in the online office 365. After accepting the license agreement, the installation process will take a few minutes, depending on your internet connection and your PC.

Initiating the app

On starting the Power BI application for the first time, it will go through an initialization process which may run for a long time. Upon finishing, you will be asked to log in to your Office 365 account in order to be able to share your dashboards and reports.

Power BI Portal Features

If you’re familiar with the Microsoft Office 365 products, it will be quite easy to understand the desktop version of Power BI as the ribbon has the same thing embedded as with Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint. The desktop version does not require an internet connection. You only need to be connected while publishing your report.

The Query Editor

It allows you to be connected with a lot of data sources, cutting across different file types or formats like CSV, JSON, and so on. You can also connect to a SQL Server on the desktop.

The desktop is the version you could easily get as it just involved making drags and drops.

The three icons on the top left side of the portal is the Report, Data, and Model icons. Here is the report icon in the screenshot, mainly used for viewing your dragged or dropped visuals. The Data icon is for viewing your dataset while the Model icon is for creating relationships and connections in your data.

The Field Pane and Visualization

It lists the column of the Excel or CSV table you load in. From the enlarged screenshot of the Field Pane, you can see some icons beside the column names indicating that the total of each column will be displayed if used in a report. In the case of geographical data, a small globe-like icon will be seen indicating that a map is the most appropriate for the visualization.

You can visualize a column by clicking on the type of chart(funnel, treemap, KPI, card, map, slicer, R, matrix, and so on) and then clicking on the required column. As you can see, each visualization offers different insights. With Power BI, you can see different visualization to find the best way to tell a story about your data.

The second series of this article is going to be a practical example and a step by step approach of how data can be visualized using Power BI. We are going to work on the same but updated dataset of my formerly written article “Detailed Analysis of the Covid-19 Data” of which we visualized using Python codes and libraries.