DA-100 Microsoft Power BI – Part 4 Section 1 – An Introduction to the Power BI Service Part 2

5. Datasets and Reports in the Power BI Service

In this video we’re going to have a look at data sets and reports and how they are shown in the Power Bi service. So here I am back in the Power Bi service back at home and you’ll see that we have got dashboards reports, workbooks and datasets and we can collapse any of those by just clicking on the word. So here I’ve collapsed absolutely everything but it’s a bit difficult to know where data sets start so it’s slightly involved but I thought they could do a bit better with the emphasizing of the headings here. So if I click on any of the data sets we don’t actually see the data set itself, we see instead a blank report. And you can use this just like you can use Power Bi desktop. Now we’ve gone through in part one of this course how to create visualizations, how to create fields. It’s exactly the same thing.

So if I create a new visualization here, I can drag it around. I’ve got the filters over here and that actually is a change from the early 2019 version. Filters were all the way down here in between the fields and drill through and then I can say have area code in the axis and measure has the values for example or I could just check them. So whatever you want to do in Power Bi desktop you might be able to do here it is a bit more restrictive. For example, you can see that I can’t create new measures, I can’t create new calculated columns, I can’t do anything to model. This is the data set that you are working with. Now I’m just going to add another visualization so we can just have a bit of an explore. So I’m going to put this as again area and the detached change put these side by side.

So we’ve got a couple of visualizations here. So let’s have a look at what we’ve got going across. So we’ve got visualizations and drill through going down, we’ve got fields going down, we’ve got filters going down. I think everybody’s probably very comfortable with that here in the file we’ve got save this report. So this will save this temporary report actually gives you a name save as does a similar job print well that goes into your dialog box for printing and then we’ve got download the report packets preview you can see it is not enabled because that is only for reports that were created in Power Bi desktop. Looking at the view we have got quite a few things we can fit to page fit to the width called your actual size. So you can see actual size gives you the scroll bars, may not be what you want.

We got high contrast colors that would be quite useful for accessibility and you can see we’ve got various high contrast options here and then we’ve got a series of viewing things like smart guides, grid lines, snap to grid lock objects and then the selection pane, the books marks pane and the sync slices pane. So, quite a few things that we’ve got here in the view section of Power Bi desktop. But as I said before, modeling isn’t there and getting new data isn’t there. And I think that’s partly the reason why Microsoft would prefer you to use Power Bi desktop for any big new reporting needs. Going across we have the Reading view.

So that gets rid if I just save this report, I’ll just call it Delete me. So I’ll delete it after the video after next here we can see that the report is being shown without the fields pane, without all of the visualizations to go back. It’s actually clicking on Edit report. So we have view reports, we have Reading view and then we have Edit reports. It may be a bit confusing mobile layout. So this is why I wanted to create two layouts, two visualizations. So here is how you can see it if you are on a mobile. So I will drag our two visualizations, I don’t have to have all two of them but you can see that, you can say this is how I want it to look if I’m using a mobile. And to go back, you can have go to the Weeding view that we’ve just looked at or the web layout that gets us back to our original starting point.

Going further across, we have got ask a question. So this is the Q and Ice interactivity that we’ve had before. So they are asked a question about your data. So what is the average price per area code for example and you can see even though I typed the word per, it hasn’t been very responsive. But this is a good way to quickly get new visualizations. So I’m just going to click on the dot dot dot and I’m going to remove that. Going further across Explore. So going through the data set again, not available with this particular report text box inserting shapes, buttons showing visual interactions and whether filters affect other visuals.

You can refresh the report duplicate, so make a copy save. And two additional items that weren’t available when we were just looking at a draft when we hadn’t clicked save pin a live page that pins it to the dashboard. We’ll have a video on that later on and share to teams. So if you’ve got Microsoft teams installed, there’s also generator QR code. So this will create a code that you can use to view the report directly from a mobile device, but only if your colleagues have got permission to see this report. So this is part of the sharing which is part of Power Bi pro and we’ve also got Analyze in Excel and again I’m going to do a separate video on that.

Now that this report which I created from a dataset has been saved, the file menu has actually got a three more options publish to web, export to PowerPoint and export to PDF. So this is one way of being able to share your analysis, another way is to publish to the web so you can put your reports on a website for people to see a quick look at the reading view because the top slightly changes so it’s just saving the report. And you can see we still have the file menu and the view menu much reduced because we’re not actually editing the report now.

So anything to do with the visualization of fields isn’t there but we can also as well as pinning a live page and refreshing and sharing to teams, we can show a comments pane. So this might be your comments, it might be other people’s comments. We can have a look at BOOKMARKS, we covered what BOOKMARKS were in the first part of this course. We can favorite it. Favorite it would mean it would be going onto the home page as a favorite. We can subscribe. So subscribe allows us to have changes notified. As you can see, that’s a pro feature as is sharing this report and we can also view related but we’ll have a look at that in a later video.

So in this video, we’ve had a look at both data sets, how it’s presented. It’s presented as I think you want to create a report. And we’ve had a look at reports as well. And we’ve seen that you can edit a report, you can have it in your reading view, you can have it in a mobile layout. And if it’s not big enough for you to actually see everything, first of all you’ve got this filters pane that can be reduced downwards. You can make sure you haven’t got any unnecessary pains shown. And you can press this view, this button, which enters the full screen mode. And you can see the report without all the clutter. And in my particular browser, I press Escape to exit and go back to my original view. So this is looking at reports and data sets in the Power Bi service or just one other thing about terminology. In part three of the calls we were referring to models and models and data sets are sent the same thing. There’s minor variance depending on where you get the data from. If you get the data from certain type of databases then you don’t need to model it. But in essence, what modeling in the Power Bi desktop and what data sets are in the Power Bi service are basically one and the same.

6. Get Data – Other People’s Data

In the previous video, we had a look at data sets and reports. But what if you wanted to bring in data yourself? So instead of having a data set that perhaps been brought in from Power Bi Desktop, how can you bring one in? And we have at this bottom left, get Data. So notice what it says at the top. Please use power of Bi desktop. So that’s the one that they recommend you to use. However you can bring in data. First of all, we have my organization. So these are any apps that are published. So you remember from a previous video that apps are a way of packaging datasets, reports, dashboards, and maybe a few other things as well. Now this, My Organization app is exactly the same thing as this link down here, organizational content packs. So I’ll click this and we have all of your organizational packs that are here, exactly the same thing. If you click on the other link, service content packs, they are provided from a company who provides a service.

So this could be Google Analytics, MailChimp and so forth, and they will show in exactly the same place. Now, you may notice that we’ve got two additional tabs at the top, template Apps and All Apps. And All Apps would be the organization plus the template apps. And we can get to that as well through this services. So if I click on Services and Get, we get to exactly the same thing. So you can see there’s a fair bit of duplication in what we’ve seen so far.

So these are apps. Again, they’re data sets, reports, dashboards that have been created by third parties for use in your organization. Whether you find them actually useful is in formata, but you can feel free to have a look at it, just hover over them and see what is included. So if I was to click on one, it gives me more information about it, or at least that’s what should be happening. And then you can install it as you see fit. Not currently working on My version, but you can see here we’ve got some information about it. So that is another way of getting data. We have samples. Samples will allow you to download various data sets.

So if I click on the consumer profitability sample, you can see that it has installed a dashboard which has a report, which has a workbook, which has a data set. So if I click on this, then this is a quick way to be able to see. And you can see at the top it says refreshing data, one possible presentation for dashboards and for reports and so forth. So this is a report for instance, you can see they’ve applied lots of filters and they’ve got the data sets from which you can create your own reports if you so wish. Now, there are also a partner showcase, so this isn’t necessarily data, this could also be services as well. For example, you can see we have some affordable and predictable packaged services such as Power Bi Training for Beginners, a two day workshop at about $3,000. And you can see what we’re creating here in this course. Not too dissimilar. On the right hand side, we have got databases. Now, again, there’s a fair bit of duplication in this. We see, for instance, we have got a zero SQL database, a zero SQL data warehouse. I click on it and it says do this from Power Bi desktop. So really there is very little here. And SQL Server Analytical Services. SSAs.

It’s saying it’s depreciated. In other words, we will not be supporting this in the future. So there’s a fair bid from here that could actually not be used and nobody wouldn’t really know the difference. Really. You need one button for Discover Content, the samples, maybe the partner work showcase and that’s it. So far they published data sets. So these are your existing data sets, but you can get those in the My Workspace and Workspaces section. Could be quite useful if you’ve got a lot of workspaces and you were getting confused as to what sources you have got. So these are all of the get data from other people’s data. In the next video we’ll have a look at really the big thing that matters apart from getting data from your organization or external data, and that is your own data.

7. Get Data – Your Data

In the previous video. We got other people’s data in this video. We’re going to get your own data. So I’ve clicked on Get Data in the bottom left hand corner and we’re going to the file section. Bring in your reports, workbooks or data from Excel, Power Bi desktop or CSV comma separated value files. And we’ve got five options. And this fifth one is it’s actually just a hyperlink to get you to a pretty nice read, to be honest, if you at all confused. So really we’ve got four options. Two of them look the same. OneDrive business and OneDrive personal. The major difference between OneDrive business and OneDrive personal and if you don’t know what OneDrive is, it’s a way of having files on the cloud. On Microsoft cloud, the difference is that business is more integrated with Power Bi. It’s the same signing process. So if I click OneDrive business, I would be getting to my OneDrive business data. How did it exist? But it doesn’t exist. So it’s saying we’re just waiting for it to exist. Well, it doesn’t.

But if you subscribe to OneDrive business, all of your files will be there. OneDrive personal click on it. You may need to have a pop up box being shown, but then you have to sign in with your Microsoft account. That’s really the only difference between these two. Now, business and personal OneDrive, they’re on the cloud, microsoft have access to them. So what happens when your data changes? Well, every hour Power Bi will connect to your files and change the data set in Power Bi. So you change something in OneDrive and up to 60 minutes later it is reflected into Power Bi SharePoint team. Again, this is a way for being able to save files much the same way as OneDrive. For business. The major difference is that you have to select a URL, a website, essentially how you connect to the file. And then you can connect to the root folder or that sort of thing. So OneDrive business, OneDrive personal SharePoint. They’re online.

OneDrive business will automatically refresh every hour or so. So let’s say you haven’t got any of that. We’re going to connect to a local file and there are two options. First of all, I need to actually get a local file. So I’ve created a file called Getdata. It’s a completely blank file and I’m not going to make it really that difficult a file. So it’s going to have first heading, second heading, and I’m going to put letters here and I’m going to put numbers here. Notice I haven’t put it at the top, just put it elsewhere just to be awkward. So I’m going to say that and close that. Right? So I’m going to load in this Get data. And there are two methods of connecting. First of all, I can bring in the data. So what the computer is going to do, it’s going to open Excel, it’s going to say this is a data set and import it, and then that’s it, the data is there. The alternative is to upload the entirety of the Excel file and put it into Excel online as a workbook. So, just to clarify, if you import the data, it becomes a data set. And you can use the data set to create reports and elements. Visualizations of the reports or entire pages can be used in Dashboards if you bring in the entirety.

So not just the data, but the entirety of this workbook, it becomes a workbook. And you can’t create a report from what Power Bi Service calls a workbook. However, what you can do is highlight a range and pin it to a Dashboard. So there is a bit of a difference there. So let’s now try importing the Excel data that we’ve got and we have a problem. We couldn’t find any data formatted as a table. So it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t quite at the top if I had moved it right to the top. Save close reimport. So this is importing still a problem. Nothing is there as a table.

So to get it as a table, I have to go into Excel and I’m going to save a second copy of this. I’m going to call this import. So we still have the original for uploading and I’m going to highlight my table and I’m going to press it. It says Control T. I can also press CTRL and L for a table. That was an older shortcut that I’m more used to. Or I can go to insert table. Either way, we get this dialog box. Where is your data set? Does my table of headers click? OK? And that’s what the computer needs. So it now knows this is a table. Now talk about this extensively in the Excel courses. This isn’t an excel course.

Just know that you need to actually make it a table. So I’m going to save this and I’m going to import it yet again. So there’s my import. Click on Import and it could take a while. And there it is. So I’m going to view my new data set, which is available in the Data sets section. Now it’s the get data import. I’ll click on View Dataset and now I can create everything from first heading, second heading and so forth. So my data is now available. So I’m going to delete this because I’m not actually wanted to use it.

And to delete it, I click on the dotted dot next to it and I go to delete so you can see. Are you sure you want to permanently delete this data set? If you’ve got any reports or dashboard tiles from the data set, that will also be deleted, since obviously the reports rely on the data set and the Dashboard tiles will lie on the reports. So I’m going to click delete and it’s gone. So now let’s have a look at the alternative way of bringing in. And I click on Get local file. I go to my original one. So why it’s not a table. And I’m uploading it and you can see, you can interact with it just like you would on Excel Online. So here is my workbook, get Data, click on it and it takes us to Excel Online, where you can see the workbook. And what is really annoying is you can’t make reports from it. You can’t convert this into a data set. However, you can put this into a dashboard.

So if I make my selection and you can see there’s very little options that you can have. So edit doesn’t work. For instance, it says editing is not supported for files uploaded from a local drive. So I can just pin it in to a dashboard. I’ll create a brand new dashboard, my dashboard, I’m just going to call it. I’m going to click pin. And if I go to the dashboard, you will be able to see that we have that data in. Now if I want to replace it, then I go to Workspaces, my dashboard, say I’ve got a latest version in my computer. So let’s actually do that. Let’s go to Get Data, add an extra row, row E, heading five, second heading five. So save that. I will go to my workbooks and I will click. This is refresh now. Refresh now doesn’t actually do anything because it just refreshes from its own local cache. We have settings which just give you options to change the workbook name and we can delete. But we have this little arrow which is replace file. So if I replace the existing online file with my new file that is on my local and click on Get Data there, it has now been expanded.

Now, one other thing that’s probably of interest, when I pin something to a dashboard from a workbook, it doesn’t get refreshed. So I have just changed this fourth line from C Three to C 13. I haven’t uploaded it yet, but you’ll see, in my dashboard, it says C three. I’m now going to go back into my workspace. I’m going to go back into workbooks, I’m going to replace the file again, which now says C 13, and we can see it now says C 13. However, if I go back into my dashboard, we have the old version. So the pin from workbooks is pin as it currently is. It doesn’t get updated once the data is updated. So that for me, makes workbooks have a really low usage for Power Bi service. So in this video, we showed how to get data. We can get data from Excel.

We can also get it from these pbix. These are the Power Bi files. So if I just import a random one, you can see it is importing, but that’s just another way of getting data from Power Bi desktop. So instead of publishing it instead, you go the other way. You go from Power Bi service and you grab it. It also imports the report as well. As you can see, there is the report previously created. So we had a look at how to import Excel. There were two options.

One option is to import the data. So that makes it into a data set. Great thing about that is that you can then build reports for it, but you do need it to be a table, otherwise you get an error message. And the second thing you can do, much less useful, is to import a local file and have it in Excel online. And you can pin ranges to dashboards and that’s it. And finally, you can get data from the cloud, from OneDrive, either the business or the personal, or from SharePoint. And if it’s in one drive, then when the data changes in an hour or less, the data in power of Bi will also change to reflect any additional.

8. The Navigation Pane, including Add a Quick Insights result to a report

In this video, we’re going to finish off looking at the navigation pane on the left hand side. So we have the home. We’ve had a look at this previously, so we have an introductory video. We have favorites and frequents. We have recently accessed Workspaces recommended apps, we’ve seen those before in the Get data and services, so it looks very familiar. And how to learn to use Power Bi, a little bit of learning there, and also a guided self paced learning, which is probably the best of those pages. Quite a lot of ideas here, but we’ve covered these basically in this course. Favorites, these are things that you have clicked on to be Favorites. So if I was going into a report, and we have over here the mark as Favorites. So you can see it better if I just reduce the size of the text.

So if I mark this level four report as a favorite and go back to the Favorites in the navigation page, you can now see that level four is one of the favorites. Again, recent. This gives me my reasons, fairly similar to what we’ve got in the home page, except the home page is limited. Here you can see there are six. If I go into the recent section that you can see, we’ve got at least ten there. Now, it used to be that we could do various actions from all of these, but unfortunately now in the recent, so all we can do is favorite them or open them.

So for the actions, you need to go to the My workspace. So go to My workspace and all we’ve got various actions that can be done. These include sharing. Again. You need a Power Bi pro license for that. Analyzing excel. We’ll look at that in a separate video. We’ve got various settings, and we’ll have a look at some of these settings later. And we can clone, we can duplicate it. We’ve also got something called Quick insights. If I click on this the very first time that you use the Quick Insights, it has to analyze the data. But what it’s done is it’s created some instances of your Q and A section. So these are tiles that you may or may not wish to use.

It’s profitable to have a look, see if any of these could be useful. And then any of these that are interesting, you can pin to a dashboard. So say I wanted to pin this to my existing My dashboard. I can click Pin and it’s pinned. So you can see your visualization has been pinned to my dashboard apps. We will look at how to create apps later when we have the Power Bi Pro license. Same was shared with me. Learn. So this gives me all of the options that we’ve seen on the home tab and a few more. Let’s have a look at what happens with the workspace items. So, Dashboards, for instance, you can open rename, share, remove and then there are settings.

Again, we’ll have a look at the settings later reports, similar things, just open Rename and remove and analyze in Excel. But it’s really this data sets that’s more interesting with the open menu. So if I click on it, we have analyzed in Excel and Delete, we’ve got security. We’re going to be looking at role level security. Just a few videos from now, we’ve got Rename, we’ve got scheduled refresh, so trying to make sure you’ve got the latest data. Again, we’ll have a look at that later, settings and permission and we’ve got this. So view related. So we have a data set, we can delete the data set.

So if I go to the level four and click on delete, it says that it will delete it and all reports and dashboard tiles containing data from this data set will also be deleted. So the question is what reports and dashboard tiles relate for this data set? So if I click on any data set and click on view relators, you could also get quick insights just like you can with reports. Then we can see that this particular one is used in a level four report, but not in any dashboard in my workspace or in any other workspaces. If I click on something else, say this customer profitability sample and have a look at view related, you can see it is used in two dashboards and in a report and it could well be used elsewhere.

And we’ve also got this show in lineage view, which takes a while to load up, but it shows where you have your data source, your data sets, your reports, and then your dashboards and how they are connected. So this, my dashboard has got information from a report and it’s got information from another report and it’s got information from a workbox in this particular case. So this allows you to see a visual view of how everything is interrelated and you can zoom out, zoom in, have a look at it, full screen. So I’ll exit that by pressing escape and we can create new dashboards reports, data sets or view. Go back to the list view there.

So that for me is a very interesting view. It allows me to see how things are interconnected. But equally, if I want to highlight starting in one particular data set, I can go to that data set and I can click on any particular data set. Maybe I’ll click on the customer profitability, I’ll click view related, I’ll click showing lineage view, wait quite a few seconds and it shows me the highlighted data set and where it is reflected. Reflected one report, two dashboards. These are the specific things and here they are highlighted. So in this video we’ve had a look at the remainder of the navigation pane and you’ve seen how you can get easy access to your favorites or recents, and how you can manipulate. So rename or get some insights from reports, dashboards and data sets, how you can rename them, how you can delete them, and how you can see what happens if you delete a data set. What reports and dashboard tiles?