Describe uses for custom visuals including charts or controls Power BI includes a large selection of visualizations, but it is also possible for organizations and users to create their own custom visualizations and share them within the organization or with the outside Power BI community. Custom visualizations can be cosmetic variants on the appearance of built-in Power BI visualizations, such as the addition of a company name or logo, or they can fulfill data display or integration requirements that are specific to the organization. In the Power BI service interface, selecting Get more visuals in the Visualizations pane provides access to the Power BI VisualsRead More →

Compare and contrast dashboards and workspaces As noted in Chapter 1, “Describe the business value of Power Platform,” Power BI supports three types of distributable content: reports, dashboards, and apps. The report is the basic content unit, a multipage document that developers can use to publish large amounts of data in various formats. From a report, the developer can create dashboards, which are limited to a single page and consist of visual elements extracted from a report. An app is a means of packaging Power BI content from various sources for distribution as a freestanding unit. When a user registers a Power BI account, theRead More →

Creating a new workspace The Workspaces tab in the Power BI service interface includes a Create a workspace button that opens the dialog box shown in Figure 3-33. As noted, the new workspace is now the default, so the process of creating a workspace does not automatically create an Office 365 group. FIGURE 3-33 The new Create a workspace dialog box in the Power BI service To control access to a new workspace after it is created, click the Access button to open the Access dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-34, in which you specify users and the workspace roles assigned to them. FIGURERead More →

Skill 3.2: Connect to and consume data The first step in creating Power BI content is to access the data that the developer intends to illustrate using the charts and other types of visualizations that Power BI provides. Doing so calls for the developer to establish a connection to any of the data sources that Power BI supports and to select specific data provided by that source. Power BI Desktop allows developers to connect to multiple data sources and model the data into the form needed to tell an appropriate story in the Power BI report. This skill covers how to: ■ Combine multiple dataRead More →

Clean and transform data Whether a Power BI content developer accesses one data source or many, it is possible that the data might need modeling before it can be used effectively in a report. Data modeling—also called shaping or transforming data—is a term that can refer to a variety of tasks, including the following: ■ Modifying data types ■ Removing rows or columns ■ Renaming tables, rows, or columns ■ Splitting columns The purpose of data modeling is to select and arrange the data accessed from the source so that it suits the visualization the developer intends to create. As always, modeling the data inRead More →

Removing rows and columns When combining data from different sources, it is common for developers not to need everything that Power BI Desktop obtains from each source. For example, the Ranking of best and worst states for retirement webpage accessed in the previous section includes a column containing the names of the states. However, a developer might want to use the two-letter state abbreviations instead. To do this, the developer can access another data source that contains columns specifying the state names and their abbreviations. However, that data source might include other information as well. For example, the data source shown in Figure 3-44 includesRead More →

Describe and implement aggregate functions Power BI uses the term aggregate to refer to mathematical functions that it executes on values obtained from data sources. When Power BI evaluates data, it automatically aggregates certain data types to anticipate the needs of the developer in creating a report. For example, when Power BI imports a table containing sales figures for a company’s branch offices, it might aggregate those figures using the sum function to add up totals for the product sales categories. Although Power BI does this automatically, it is still possible for developers to modify the automatic aggregations or apply new aggregations to data asRead More →

Identify available types of data sources including Microsoft Excel Before Power BI developers can do any modeling or visualizing, they must obtain the data they intend to use. The Power BI service and Power BI Desktop both provide support for hundreds of data sources, which they can access as local files, as databases within the organization, or as cloud-based services on the internet, whether public or private. The data sources available in the Power BI service and Power BI Desktop differ, as does the means of accessing them. Microsoft is continually adding support for more data sources in Power BI, so it is not uncommonRead More →