Power BI - Summary

Overview

Power BI is a display and graphical software, similar to PowerPoint. The main difference, however, is that Power BI is interactive in terms of filtering data. The creating of a Power BI "report" requires an inputted dataset. This could be an Excel sheet, an online database, or even a manually inputted table. A "dashboard" is a collection of reports, arranged in a tile pattern (link dashboard page).

Getting Started

It is recommended that the desktop version of Power BI is used, as it can be easily published to the online version upon completion.

Upon opening Power BI for the first time, this page will be displayed. The first step to creating a Power BI report is to load a dataset. First, click "Get Data".

Power BI startup screen

File:SynWiki Tutorial Data.xlsx

Here, a dataset can be inputted into the program. Choose where Power BI should receive the data from. For this example, I created a completely fake set of Tender Evaluation data. This file can be downloaded here to follow the tutorial.