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Introducing Power BI

In the "old days," the kinds and sources of data available to us in the workplace were limited. Making data-driven decisions was a process of gathering enough reports, synthesizing that data into spreadsheets, and pivoting that data into various ways of slicing and dicing until you reached some level of clarity to proceed with a decision. Some folks were lucky enough to have data warehousing tools to assist them with that process, but more often than not, even they had to wrangle that data from the warehouse and pull it all together into multiple tables and charts side-by-side to try to make heads or tails of what was seen. And if someone had the audacity to ask, "What would happen if I changed this one variable?" or "How does this data category impact this other category?" then you'd be spending another week reloading, rearranging, and reformatting the results.

But things have changed dramatically even in the last decade. The simultaneous growth of processing power and data availability has been accompanied by applications that are designed to leverage that explosive growth. Data analysis tools now easily enable exploration of large volumes of data and provide a dynamic experience where one can quickly visualize, "What would happen if I change that one variable?" or "How does this data category impact this other category?" Enter Power BI: Microsoft's game-changing data analysis service.

NOTE All those efforts, tools, and infrastructure to gather data from the various sources that are available in order to provide good insights for making business decisions is what the industry calls business intelligence (BI).

WHAT IS POWER BI?

Microsoft describes Power BI like this:

"Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/power-bi-overview

Power BI has three primary components: a Windows desktop application, an online service, and a mobile application.

The desktop application is used to create reports and build datasets (from which reports can consume data). While Power BI reports can be created online in the Power BI Service (more to come on that in a little bit), Power BI Desktop (see Figure 1.1) allows you to take advantage of all the features available in report creation and data modeling (Chapter 6 will cover what in the world that means).

FIGURE 1.1: Power BI Desktop

HOW DO I GET POWER BI DESKTOP ON MY COMPUTER?

There are two primary ways to install Power BI Desktop: through the Microsoft Store (https://aka.ms/pbidesktopstore) or through the Microsoft Download Center (www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=58494).

The advantage to using the Microsoft Store is that your desktop version will continue to stay updated to the latest version. Microsoft releases a new version of Power BI Desktop every month with new features or enhancements as well as bug fixes. Staying on top of the latest version ensures you have the best experience using Power BI.

The downside to staying up-to-date on the latest version would be if you are working with another person who is unable to use the Microsoft Store and has to use the Download Center; in that case, if you used a new feature that came out this month, published a report using that feature, and then asked your colleague to work on that report, they would be forced to update their installed version.

You may wonder, "Isn't that an odd situation? Shouldn't everyone just stay up-to-date on the latest version?" And you wouldn't be out of bounds to think that-it is a best practice to use the Microsoft Store version so that you can stay up-to-date. However, I have found that many of our customers work in large enterprises that have what are referred to as managed desktops. This means most of the users do not have the ability to install software on their Windows computers. In those situations, the central IT department manages which version of software is available. In this case, the IT department would indicate which version of Power BI Desktop they would want to be used.

You might also be wondering, "Wouldn't my colleague and I automatically have the same version then?" You wouldn't be off your rocker to think that! Again, however, I have run into scenarios where some individuals have elevated privileges on their Windows computers and some of their colleagues do not.

So, the first lesson to be learned is: take some time to learn within your organization what version of Power BI Desktop they would prefer you to use. And.ask to use the Microsoft Store version! The second lesson would be to consider whether you'll be working within a team of people who will all be creating Power BI reports and talk about how you'll plan on staying in sync and which version of Power BI Desktop you'll use as a group.

With Power BI Desktop you will import data from your different sources, arrange it in ways that make business sense, and then create reports on top of that imported data. (You won't always have to import data, but in this book that is the approach we will take.) Once you have a report in a state that you think is useful enough to share, then you will publish that report to the Power BI Service (see Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2: Publishing to the Power BI Service

The Power BI Service is a cloud-based service (sometimes you'll hear it referred to as software as a service, or SaaS) that serves as a central repository for all of your reports and datasets and those others have created in your organization. The Power BI Service's main job is to serve up the reports that you published. The service enables you to share content with others. Here you'll organize your reports and datasets into workspaces. While workspaces give you the ability to organize like-for-like, more importantly, they give you a space in which to collaborate with other people developing reports with related content. Furthermore, workspaces give you the ability to say who and how others can access your reports. This is called governance. While it's great that you can share your insights and allow others to gain insights, you always have to think, "Who should have access to reports and data in this workspace, and what should they be able to do in this workspace?"

The third component of Power BI is the mobile application (see Figure 1.3). Unlike the Desktop version, there is a version for iOS as well as Android. The mobile application is similar to the online version but behaves much like you would expect a mobile application to behave and has a modern look-and-feel. When you create reports, you are able to create a separate view of the same report as it will be displayed in the mobile application. This means that it will fit well into a mobile format.

FIGURE 1.3: Power BI Mobile

There are three kinds of individuals who interact with Power BI: report creators, report consumers, and Power BI admins, as shown in Figure 1.4. We will skip talking about Power BI admins, because that is beyond the scope of this book, but just know that there is a wide array of options available to your organization to manage and control the use of Power BI.

FIGURE 1.4: Report creators, report consumers, and Power BI admins interact with Power BI

Report creators are those who, well.create reports! Presumably that would be you. Report creators can fall into two categories: business users and IT professionals. IT professionals are sometimes referred to as data engineers. These are individuals who get paid to do this! Data engineers are familiar with writing sophisticated code to extract data from a plethora of sources, bringing that data into a centralized location (maybe in the cloud in a data lake or into a database on a server located in an on-premises data center), and then arranging that data so that it is readily consumed by business users. They often will also make very complex reports that retrieve this data and present it in a Power BI report or with some other reporting tool. On top of all this, they often are dealing with volumes of data on a scale of not just millions of rows but possibly billions of rows!

You, on other hand, may have a whole set of responsibilities that make up your job, and just one aspect is figuring out how to wrangle the data you work with into something that can help you or someone else make heads or tails of the data you use on a daily basis. What is interesting, though, is that the methods (and consequent skills) you will learn in this book are based on the same proven methodologies that those data engineers use day in and day out. That should give you a level of confidence as you proceed down this journey with Power BI!

That...