This is a beginner’s session that focuses on what Microsoft Power BI is and what this tool can do. The session is specially for developers who have started to work on building reports and dashboards using Power BI. The tool is not just for visualization, but it extends its capabilities to data cleaning and data transformations. We will start the session by opening a fresh Power BI file and making ourselves aware of the basic elements like:
• Report page, canvas, gridlines, page settings to familiarise ourselves with the tool interface.
• Available Data source connections – files, folders, azure, database, etc.
• Different types of filters – visual level, page level & report level.
• In-built data hierarchy in the data.
• Show and talk about Report, Data and Model View in Power BI.
• A walkthrough by loading a sample data csv/excel file in Power BI and start looking at few data transformations/cleaning in Query editor.
• Basic data cleaning and transformations using query editor – modifying datatypes, handling missing values, creating new custom column, adding an index column.
• Once the data is loaded, we will start by generating few basic charts.
• Basic visuals for reporting – line charts, bar charts, columns charts, pie-charts, card visual, tree-maps.
• Edit Interactions functionality to control the interactions among different visuals on the report.
• As Power BI is a very strong tool in identifying key insights in the data, we will cover few interesting data behaviours that we see on the data.