Getting Started with Power BI

Hello, everyone! In this series of getting started videos, we show you how Power BI helps you and your team discover insights and keep up to date with the information you need to make critical business decisions. In this segment, I'll build a web dashboard with our team sales data so our team knows if we're on track to meet our goals. Power BI connects with lots of web apps directly, but even if your data is stuck on your laptop in Excel like mine is, you can use Power BI to create a web dashboard that you can access from anywhere and share with others. So let's head over to Excel to get started. Here is the Excel spreadsheet our finance team usually sends out in weekly emails. You can see it's a simple table of financial records by segment, country, and product. Excel is a great place for making quick updates and making simple forecasts, but it's a pain to wade through my inbox to find the latest version when I need a quick answer. So let's head over to Power BI to start building our dashboard. The get data button lets you bring your own data into your dashboard. Here on the left are the available sources we have, and we're currently working to connect more web apps and data sources. I click on connect to find the Excel workbook we were looking at earlier, and if you already store documents in the cloud using a service like One Drive, I can choose those options so that when I make changes to the workbook on any of my devices, the dashboards always stay up to date. Once I am done selecting the workbook, all I need to do is hit connect, and my data will start uploading to Power BI. Power BI has uploaded my workbook, and since I was on the sample dashboard, created a new dashboard with the file's name. This happens any time you are on a dashboard that you cannot edit yourself. You can see that it added the Excel workbook here as a data set. You can also see it on the list on the left. I'll open the data set to start building my first report. Here on the right side, you'll see all the tables and fields that came from my Excel workbook. When I start dragging fields over to the canvas, Power BI looks through the data and tries to give me the best chart possible. So, for example, when I drag country over, it gave me units sold on a map. Also, if I drag data over, it will put that on a line chart for me. Now, if I don't like the visual that Power BI gives to me by default, I can always go on the side here and click on this bar chart here and select the visual I want to change it to. Now that I have a report I want to keep, I'll hit the save button and give it a name. Once I hit save, my report should show up on the left navigation bar on my dashboard. This line chart is something that I want to monitor more regularly. I want to have a dashboard with my most critical data all in one place, so to add this visual to my dashboard, I just have to hit this pin button on the right. While I'm at it, I'll also pin the other two visuals to my dashboard as well. Now when I return to my dashboard, I'll see the latest information about my sales at a glance. Here you see the visuals that I had just pinned from my report. I can also connect to additional data and fine tune my dashboard to give me a single view of my team's performance. In four minutes, we saw how to take a simple spreadsheet on my desktop, and create a dashboard that I can share with others. Now it's your turn to give it a try on app.powerbi.com. You can sign up by going to powerbi.com/dashboards.