Introduction
This article will explain the options available in Power BI and how to use them to create reports and dashboard. Additionally, it will reveal how to create reports and dashboard using Power BI with an illustration. It explains simple steps to get started with Power BI desktop for beginners.
Power BI has plethora of features or options to design and format reports, dashboards and represent data in graphical view. Additionally, Power BI has user friendly drag and drop facility to design reports and dashboard within short time. User feels comfortable to use and manage the reports and dashboard using Power BI hence it is mostly use reporting tool in current context. Using it we can graphically represent data and provide business intelligence with less effort. In short, we can say that it makes designer’s life easier.
Options: There are several options available in Power BI. We can use those according to our design need. However, mainly I will introduce and represent screen shots for Insert and Visualization in this blog. From visualizations we can represent data in the form of bar chart, pie chart, line chart, table, gauge, map, scatter plot and many more as illustrated in below picture. Whereas, from Insert option in Top bar we can use, Text box, Button, Shapes, Images, New visuals, More Visuals and so on.
New Visuals inserts bar graph by default. On the other hand, from More Visual option, we can upload custom file as well as import visuals from other Source App.
Fields
Fields is another option available in Power BI. Fields in our design can be added from this option which is available below the Visualizations. It is used to format and represent which data and level should be reflected in which position in our graph, bar, or chart. Based on these field selections, our data will be represented visually in the design. Easily, we can drag and drop our column to this field.
Formats
Report design format such as background color, font size, font colour, font family, alignment, title and many more options for formatting are available under this section. Page design can be done from below screen; however, for specific design: pie, bar, table scatter plot, donut chart etc. can be done by selecting particular item at one time and then go to format section and choose style of your choice.
For more information, I will start with design demonstration
Pie Chart
In Power BI we can visualize data in several forms; however, I will demonstrate in Pie chart, Bar graph and Tabular form.
To add Pie chart, select pie from visualizations area and pie will be inserted into body of your page.
We can get options for Legends, Values, details below the Visualizations as depicted below.
In my chart I want to visualize no of employee in each branch inside pie. So, I am going to drag sum of Ids in Values field and Branch to Legend so that we will get number of employees in each Branch.
To rename title of chat, just right click on values and click on rename and give the name of the chart.
Clustered Column Chart:
Go to Visualization select chart of your choice. Here in this demo I am selecting clustered column chart.
Drag the Field on Legend and Value for which you want to show data in your clustered column chart. For my report, I have selected Total count of Id in Value field and Branch in Legend field so that number of employees in each branch will be depicted in the chart as shown in below picture.
Renaming the field: To rename title of chart right click on value field and click on rename and give name.
After renaming my chart becomes as shown below.
Finally, our dashboard looks like as depicted below.
Conclusion
This article has described the different options available in Power BI Desktop shortly and demonstrated how to create pie and column chart in dashboard using Power BI with an example. After going through this article reader will get basic information on how to use power BI desktop. Furthermore, reader will be able to design dashboard with Pie and Column chart. In next part, we will explore more on other designs.
Rijwan Ansari