How to use Microsoft Power BI - Tutorial for Beginners

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can use microsoft power bi with power bi you can get insights from your data when i worked at microsoft i use power bi all the time to analyze how our businesses were performing and to make decisions on that performance we're going to walk through a few different things today first off i'm going to show you how you can both download and install power bi it's entirely free to do then we're going to import some sample data into power bi we're going to create some visualizations off of it and what good would visualizations be and reports be unless you could show it to others we're going to save it publish it and then share it with others so they can get access to your visualizations as well this is going to be a high level overview of power bi more of a 101 or introduction if you want to see me go more in depth in power bi leave comments down below leave some questions and i'll add them to my list of videos to create all right well why don't we jump on the pc and get started here i am on my pc and first off i want to show you how you can download and install power bi and to do that we're going to navigate to the following website now don't worry you don't have to type in the website instead you can click into the description of this video and i have a link to this website simply go ahead and click on there and that'll drop you on this page on this page by far the easiest way to install power bi and the way i'd recommend doing it is clicking on the download free button when you click on this this will open up the microsoft store on the power bi download page if you haven't installed it yet this text here will say install once you've installed it you'll be able to launch it now once again downloading power bi desktop is entirely free you don't need an enterprise account you don't need a commercial account anyone can download power bi desktop the benefit of installing through the microsoft store is anytime power bi updates you automatically get those updates anytime any of the components change the microsoft store will only download the pieces that change so the updates should be pretty quick and easy and lastly a nice added benefit is you don't have to be the admin logged onto your machine you could be any user to go ahead and install power bi desktop this is one way you can download and install if you prefer there's also another option where you can click on see download or language options when you click on this this does not go through the microsoft store instead you could download an exe and then you could install it on your own so here on the page you simply go ahead choose the language that you want to install in and then click on the download button on the download page you can either choose 64-bit or 32-bit depending on what type of system you're on and then go ahead and click next and it'll download an exe that you can install on your machine those are the two ways you can install once again i would recommend going with the first option where you click on download here once you finish installing power bi let's go ahead and launch it you could go to your start menu and type in power bi i also recommend pinning it to your taskbar for quick access in the future when you launch power bi for the first time you'll see this welcome screen appear and i want to take a moment to walk through it up here in the top left hand corner the most important thing you could do to get started is to get data you can't create visualizations unless you have some data you'll also see recent sources so these are any other data sources that you've used in the past for quick access and down at the bottom if you've ever used power bi before you'll also be able to get back to reports that you've created now over on the right hand side power bi provides a whole bunch of training content to get you up to speed on how to use power bi once you watch this video if you still feel like you need some additional contacts or you need some additional tutorials i highly recommend looking at this material there are some awesome videos and also tutorials that you can run through today what i want to do is i want to run through an example of the kevin cookie company this is a fictional company that i created that i use in many of my different tutorials and i want to show you how we could analyze some of the sales data for the kevin cookie company before we get the data in power bi i want to just give you a preview of what the data looks like so you know what we're working with today first off i have an excel spreadsheet that contains a whole bunch of data it happens to be in excel but this could also be in say a sql database it could be a custom query that i run to get this output so just think of this as some data that i'm getting and it just happens to be an excel spreadsheet just for simple simplification and also so you could follow along as well within the excel spreadsheet i have a whole bunch of revenue cost and also profit data i'll just go through one row just so you have an idea of what type of data we're working with first off i have sales in a number of different countries so i have the country listed in a column then i also have the product we have a variety of products like chocolate chip cookies oatmeal raisin and so on we've sold a certain number of cookies in each of these markets and i've listed out how many sales you have the revenue for each type of cookie the cost the overall revenue then we have the overall cost and then you have the profit then for the last few columns we also list out the date the month and then also the year when these sales occurred so that's a quick view of what's in this spreadsheet and i'm also going to pull in one other source of data into power bi as well and it's going to come from the web now there's a wikipedia article here that lists out countries and also the population by the country for my analysis and power bi i want to show all the countries where we have locations and i also want to align it with the population once again i have a link to this spreadsheet and a link to this website url on wikipedia in the description if you want to follow along with this example now that we've taken a look at what type of data we're going to be working with let's go ahead now and click on get data this brings up the get data dialog and like i said before there is an exhaustive list of places where you can get data from you could get data from a sql database from the web from custom queries the list goes on and on chances are if you have data somewhere you'll be able to pull it into power bi today we're starting out with a simple example and we're just going to use a spreadsheet and it's a it's an excel spreadsheet so i'll click on excel and then click on connect next this brings up the file picker and i see the file here on my desktop if you're following along and you downloaded the spreadsheet feel free to navigate to where you downloaded the spreadsheet and go ahead and then click on open this brings up the data navigator and i see my spreadsheet right here the kevin cookie company financials and within the spreadsheet it detected two different items one of them is the financials table and the other one is the cookie sales sheet the cookie sales sheet is made up of only one table and that's the financials table so these two items are identical and i could choose either one in this case i'm going to go ahead and check the box for cookie sales and then i see all of my data over here on the right hand side if i just wanted to continue at this point i could go ahead and click on load and that would bring it into power bi however i want to transform the data first now you might be wondering well what does transform data mean in a sense it allows me to modify my data and select what data i want to bring in before i bring it into power bi so let's go ahead and click on transform data and i'll show you some of the changes i want to make to it this opens up the power query editor and this is where i'll be able to transform my data basically what i'm doing is i'm shaping the data and i'm building a data model from it so let me show you what i mean so here you see the spreadsheet view again and i want to make a few different changes for instance we have a bunch of different products we sell at the kevin cookie company all the way from chocolate chip cookies to white chocolate macadamia nut cookies we also sell fortune cookies however we've decided to cut this product line because in the past when we've looked at it we've seen that the profitability of selling cookie fortune cookies isn't that high and it's been distracting us from our other products and our other business lines so i want to remove it from this analysis so i'm going to go ahead now and uncheck fortune cookie and then click on ok so now by doing these changes i'm starting to transform the data now when i look over at units sold you'll see that i also have some decimals here for united states chocolate chip cookie in one month we sold 0.5 cookies now that doesn't make any sense and so i want to eliminate decimals from the data analysis that we're going to do and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on the unit sold column we're going to right click on it and then i want to click on change type and i'm going to go ahead and make all of these just whole numbers next as i look through my table here one other thing that doesn't quite make sense if i go over to the right hand side i say month name instead of saying month name i could be a little more concise so i'm going to just double click on this column header and i'm going to get rid of month name and we're just going to call this column month as i go through and i make all of these changes over on the right hand side you'll see this section called applied steps these are all the different transformations i'm making to the data so let's say that maybe i made a change and i didn't really intend to make that change i can remove that step so here is an example you see this filtered row if i click in here i could see what i filtered here i filtered out fortune cookies now i don't want to just eliminate fortune cookies all together because it was something we were selling and i probably should include it in our visualizations that we're making so on second thought let me go ahead and keep it so what i could do is i could click this x and then i could delete that step and that'll remove that transformation to my data all of this data looks pretty good now and i feel good about it and i'm ready to bring this into power bi one thing i want to do though before i bring this data in is i also wanted to bring in population for these different countries to do that i'm going to go up to the top ribbon and i'm going to click on new source and this data is coming from the web now once again i could click on more and that'll bring up the same data source dialog that we saw earlier but i also see web highlighted here so i'm going to click here because that's easier to pull this up this brings up the from web dialog and what i'm going to do here is it asks me for the url so i'm going to go ahead and paste the wikipedia site url within here and once i paste it in i'm going to go ahead and click on ok similar to before this also brings up the navigator and here i can see all the different elements that are on the wikipedia page i'm going to click on this first one the sovereign states and dependencies and here i see all of the data all of the countries with the associated population this is exactly what i want now this is really cool that if you find a table on some website you can pull that in as a data source into power bi once i'm satisfied with this table and everything looks good i'm going to click on ok over on the left hand side now you see that i have two different queries one of them is are my cookie sales and the other one is the wikipedia article i'm going to right click on this and give it a name that makes more sense i titled it country populations and simplified the name somewhat and here within this table i don't need all of this data so similar to before i'm also going to transform the data that appears here for instance i don't need the percent of world population so i'm going to go ahead and remove this column i don't need the date and i also don't need the source to appear either and i don't care so much for the rank either all i want is the country name and then the associated population for the kevin cookie company we only have locations in a few of these countries so i don't need to bring all this data in for all these different places so once again i'm going to transform the data even more so i'm going to click on this drop-down and i'm going to filter it down to only the countries i care about so i'm going to type in canada france germany mexico and the last one is the united states once i enter in all my different countries where we have locations i'm going to go ahead and click on ok and here i see the five countries where we have locations now it's not quite done because here i see united states and there's a d after it so one thing i'm going to do is right click on this and i'm going to replace the value and the replaced value will remove the d and then i'm going to click on ok and similarly for france i'm going to go ahead and do the same thing now i have my list of countries and i also have the population associated with those countries the next thing that i want to do is i want to connect this data here or this table with my cookie sales table right now they're both independent tables and i want to be able to associate the two of them or to join them and to do that i'm going to click into the cookie sales table i'm going to go up to merge queries and i want to connect it based on the country name so i'm going to select the country name here and my cookie sales data and then in my country populations i'm going to connect it based on the country name it asks me about privacy i'm going to ignore privacy checks for now this is just kevin cookie company so i'm not too worried i'll go ahead and save that and it looks like every single row in my kevin cookie company table has a match with populations and i'm going to go ahead and click on ok over on the right hand side now you've seen cookie sales it's added a column let me go ahead and click on this filter option and i want to see the population so i'm going to click on ok and now here for every row within the kevin cookie company data i see a population associated with that country all of this looks good i brought in my spreadsheet i brought in data from wikipedia and i connected the wikipedia data to my cookie sales data so i'm pretty satisfied now i don't need to make any other changes and the next thing i do now is over here in the top left hand corner let's click on close and apply now that we've created our data models power bi drops us on a blank canvas i want to take a moment to walk through and orient you to where we are right now right here in the center of the page this big blank area this is called the report editor this is the canvas where we're going to create all of our visuals so think things like charts or tables or maps all of those will go within this space here over on the right hand side these are all of our fields and so you'll recognize the kevin cookie sales and then all of our columns appear within here and similarly i have another table for the country population so all of those are called fields basically it's all of the data that we have and that we can build visuals off of right to the left of that there's another pane called visuals these are all the different types of visuals we can build using the data over in fields or from this pane now that we've looked at visualizations i also want to show you what's over here on the left hand side over here the the first view and the default view that we drop in is the report view this is where we're going to build all of our visuals underneath that you have another option for data and if i click on that you'll see the yellow indicates the view that i'm in this is a view of all of my data so once again this is the same type of view as what we saw in the spreadsheet earlier although it's all been transformed now based on the earlier step over here on the right hand side i can see my fields again and i could jump between the different data or underlying data that i have here in power bi then over on the left-hand side there's a third option called model these are all of my different relationships between my data i'm going to go ahead and expand this if i hover over you'll see this line connects my two tables one of them is my cookie sales the other is my country populations when i hover over this line you see that i related or joined these tables based on the country name and so that's why those two items highlight let's go back and click into report and let's go ahead and start building some visualizations to help us make decisions based on our business data the first thing i want to do is i have this blank canvas and i should give a little bit of context when people look at this report so what i'm going to do is when i click on the home option on the ribbon there's an option to insert a text box i'm going to click on that and let me insert a title for this report and maybe i'll go ahead and call this the kevin cookie company performance report i type in the name let me make it a little larger just so it helps frame the entire report that we're going to create and i'm going to go ahead and expand it so it spreads across the entire report okay we have the title on here things are looking good but we need to get some visualizations in now the first thing i want to look at is what was our profit by date so to get profit by date i'm going to go over to the right hand pane on the side and i'm simply going to click on profit now power bi pulls in a default bar chart it predicted that this was the most likely one that i wanted to use we could still change that though if it doesn't align exactly with what we wanted to create and i also want to line it up with the date so i'm also going to click on date over here within the fields pane now i see it shows it by year so in 2018 we had about 650 000 of profit when i hover over the item i see a tool tip that shows me the exact value and when i hover over 2019 i see that we had a little over two million dollars worth of profit over on the right hand side let's say that i want to see the profit data not by year but i want to see it by the month so what i could do is i'm going to click on this drop down and instead of doing date hierarchy i'm going to switch it to date and now this will show me the month by month and year view of what profit was like now bar chart works okay for this type of analysis but i actually prefer a line chart and to do that i simply go up here in the visualizations pane and i can click on line chart and that will switch the type of this chart now this looks pretty good i'm going to go ahead and just make it a little bit smaller and then move it up on my report so here now i could see my profit by date when we look over at visualizations you'll see a few other things here in the axis power bi automatically identified that the date should be the access and the profit should be the values now you can move things around as you see fit you could also add things to the legend if you want to do that you can even add secondary values here so you could define what the different elements of the chart are the next thing i want to do is i want to create a view of all of the geographies where we have locations and i also want to see the profit by those geographies to do that first off i'm going to click on country now here too power bi identifies that it's country data and it automatically inserts the map visualization and here you see a map now now i see dots where i have locations but i want to see profit data by those different countries and so here too what i could do is i'm going to click on profit and i can even drag that over drop it on my map and now i see visuals that represent how much profit by country so here it looks like north america canada and also france all had about the same amount of profit while germany and mexico are smaller dots indicating that there is less profit there i could also once again if i want to switch the type of view i could switch it to a tree map and here i could see profit by country this way as well so here once again i could see which country had the most profit all the way down to which country had the least and now it turns out most of these countries are pretty similar but here i get the sense of what was the most all the way down to what was the least i'm going to switch back to the map view the next thing i want to do is insert a table that'll show me the population and then the units sold for that population so here i'm going to click on table this will insert a table now when i click on the visualization first without selecting any of the data it'll simply insert a blank table let me pull it up here i could easily drag and drop things around to organize my report how i see fit here what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull in the population so here i have a field for population country population let's go ahead and drop that in and then i also want to pull in the different countries now i can see the country the population for that country the next thing i want to do is also how many units were sold for each of those countries here now i have a table and let me go ahead and i'll position country first so here now i can see the country what the population of the country is and i can also see how many units were sold for that country now a little beyond what we're going to do today but some of the things you could do you could also insert calculated fields so you could do things like per capita how many cookies did we sell you could do those types of calculations given the data that you have existing but that's above and beyond what we're doing today the last thing i want to do is insert a bar chart and for the bar chart i want to look at sales by product so let's go ahead and i'm going to click on the blank report again and here i'm going to click on product and next i want to click on the profit for each of the products and let's go ahead and change the type and i'm going to go with a bar chart here you see a simple bar chart that i inserted and it shows me all of the product names and the associated pro profit for each of those products so here i could see that chocolate chip cookies generated the highest amount of profit and then the fortune cookies generated the least amount of profit now that i've inserted all of these different visuals into my report it's also very easy to slice the data so here i can bring in a slicer i'm going to insert that and then i'm going to drag and drop the country name on the slicer so here if i just want to view data for the united states i can click on the united states and you'll see that all the visuals now adjust to reflect just that country similarly i could click on mexico and that'll shift to mexico and i could go through and slice my data by country so very quickly i could see my profit by date by country i could see the population and then i could also see which product was the most profitable very quickly simply by selecting the market another way i could also slice the data is rather than inserting a slicer i could also click into my different visuals so here if i click on the map on the united states this too also serves as a quick way to slice my data so here i could just see germany data i could see france data or here i could see mexico data so very quickly i can adjust my i could very quickly slice my data here if i just click on the map in let's say a random area like the atlantic ocean it'll then turn on all the different countries again even in the table too i could click on a country here and that'll filter it by that country and once again i could go ahead and undo it i have a whole bunch of really valuable information in this report now i also want to show you how you could change the look and feel of it this report doesn't look all that great so let me go ahead and see how i could change this if i go up to the ribbon and i click on view under themes i have all these different themes that i can apply now maybe the executive theme would be a nice one so let me click on executive and here you'll notice that the colors changed and it looks a little bit more professional in my opinion i could also adjust the look of my different visuals that i have within this report so if i click on the visual over here under visualizations the initial view is the field view but here i could click on format it kind of looks like a paint roller and if i click into that i could adjust all these different elements of the visual for instance let's say i wanted to make the title a little bit bigger i could click on title and then i could go ahead and increase the text size and so maybe i make it a 20 point font just so it stands out a little bit more maybe i want to call out this one and i could go through and modify the titles on the other ones as well all in all with these different tools that you have under the format tool you could go ahead and get the visuals to match your company or your business's brand and look and feel feel free to go ahead and play around with it and get it to how you want it to look i've gone through and i have this report it looks pretty good if i wanted to add say additional pages to my report i could also go in and i could add more pages i could also go ahead and rename this page if i wanted to but for now i think page one that sounds fine once i'm done making all of my edits i want to go ahead and save this and to save it i'm going to click on file save as and let me go ahead and for now i'll save a copy on my desktop i'm going to call this kevin cookie company report and then click on save now i could use this on my own just fine i could analyze the data i could create different views on my data and i can work in isolation but really the power of power bi comes from being able to work with others and being able to publish reports so other people can see it and other people can interact with the different views that you created to share the report with others first we need to publish it so let's go up to the file menu we're gonna go down to publish and then we're gonna publish to power bi the power bi service is what houses all of these different reports that we publish so i'm going to go ahead let's click on power bi and it says do you want to save your changes i'll go ahead and save the changes again before i publish and then it asks me to choose a destination i'm going to go ahead and select my workspace look at that it looks like it was successful it's saving it to the power bi service now what i could do is if i click on open kevin cookie company report pbix i could open it in power bi let's go ahead and open it and see what this looks like this will open up the power bi service and here i can see my kevin cookie company report on powerbi.com and here too i could go ahead and filter the data just like i did in the power bi desktop application the nice thing about putting it on the web is if i want other people to come in and to see my visuals that i created i can go up to the top right hand corner and i can click on share this opens up the share dialog and i have all sorts of different options here i could go ahead and grant access to different individuals by entering in their email address i could also go ahead and i can allow them to share the report with others i can let them create new content based on the underlying data sets and i can send an email notification and if i make any changes it'll include it for them so here i could define what the permissions are when i share this with other people alright well that was a quick look at how you can get started using power bi once again that was a high level overview if you want to see me go deeper into power bi leave comments down below let me see what else you'd like me to jump into and i'll add it to my list of videos to create if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up if you want to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out all alright well that's all the content i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye you

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 912,711

Rating: 4.9676609 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, power bi, powerbi, power, bi, business intelligence, intelligence, business, metrics, metric, microsoft, microsoft 365, 365, 360, data, analysis, visual, visualization, report, reports, dashboard, powerbi.com, source, training, help, guide, support, how to, sql, kusto, azure, transform, shape, models, model, data model

Id: TmhQCQr_DCA

Length: 27min 52sec (1672 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020