Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Complete Reference

By : Devin Knight, Brian Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Manuel Quintana, Brett Powell
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Complete Reference

By: Devin Knight, Brian Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Manuel Quintana, Brett Powell

Overview of this book

Microsoft Power BI Complete Reference Guide gets you started with business intelligence by showing you how to install the Power BI toolset, design effective data models, and build basic dashboards and visualizations that make your data come to life. In this Learning Path, you will learn to create powerful interactive reports by visualizing your data and learn visualization styles, tips and tricks to bring your data to life. You will be able to administer your organization's Power BI environment to create and share dashboards. You will also be able to streamline deployment by implementing security and regular data refreshes. Next, you will delve deeper into the nuances of Power BI and handling projects. You will get acquainted with planning a Power BI project, development, and distribution of content, and deployment. You will learn to connect and extract data from various sources to create robust datasets, reports, and dashboards. Additionally, you will learn how to format reports and apply custom visuals, animation and analytics to further refine your data. By the end of this Learning Path, you will learn to implement the various Power BI tools such as on-premises gateway together along with staging and securely distributing content via apps. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide by Devin Knight et al. • Mastering Microsoft Power BI by Brett Powell
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Dashboards versus reports


Executives and high-level stakeholders require a holistic yet streamlined view of the top metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), established by their organization. While Power BI reports deliver a rich, self-service analytical experience, optionally at a very detailed level, Power BI dashboards provide an integrated and simplified consumption layer. From a technical architecture standpoint, Power BI dashboards are exclusive to the Power BI online service and are primarily composed of tiles representing visuals from one or many reports. Although each Power BI report is limited to a single source dataset, a dashboard's tiles can represent multiple datasets from highly disparate sources to help provide a 360 degree view on a single canvas.

To less experienced users and BI team members, the terms and capabilities associated with dashboards and reports can be misunderstood.

For example, the data-driven alert is exclusive to Power BI dashboards, while embedding...