Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By : Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By: Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky

Overview of this book

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions. You’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You’ll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you’ll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency. This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented. By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
10
Other Books You May Enjoy
11
Index

Visualizing data using cards

The ways for Power BI to get detailed data into the hands of a user are vast. Tables, matrices, bar chats, and combo charts all provide large quantities of data to users in a single visual. Sometimes, like a KPI, users just need to see a number. When the trend or target components of a KPI are not required, turn to the Card visualization. The Card is the most basic of visuals displaying only a single value. If slightly more detail is necessary, but required at a group level, look to the Multi-row card.

Before moving on, create a new report page called Card Data.

Card

The Card is useful for highlighting a series of related metrics in a dashboard, displaying the most recent or oldest date in a dataset, and calling out important numbers for a detailed report. Some formatting options are available to change the font size or color, but at its core, the card visual just displays a single value.

Let's look at setting up a Card:

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