Get Started with Power BI - Build Visuals using Sample Dataset

Greetings Guys! Hope you all are doing good. In this blog I will walk you through the Power BI Desktop Application and show you how to import a sample dataset and start creating meaningful visualizations.

Hope you have already installed Power Bi Desktop Application in your laptop if not please check my previous blog. Let's get started.

You will see the below screen once you launch the Power Bi Desktop Application.

Now Click on Try a Sample Dataset option which is Highlighted in the below screenshot. This will import a sample dataset using which you can start creating the visuals.

Once you click on Try Sample Dataset you will see the below screen. Click on Load Sample Data option as Marked in the below picture.

Now you will get a Navigator Pane which will show you the list of available tables. You can select the required tables and you can see a preview of that table as shown below.

Here I am importing the financials table. As you can see in the above picture I can see a preview of that table on the right side of the Navigator Pane. 

At the bottom of the Navigator Pane you can see three options :- Load, Transform & Cancel.

Click on Load button to import the financials table directly. Transform tab can be used to apply some transformations on top of the data that we have in the financials table. I will explain the uses of Transform tab in the coming blogs so stay tuned :)

Once you click on the load button you will see the below screen.

Upon loading the table you will be able to see the table name listed under the Data pane that we have at the right side of the screen as shown in the below table.

To the left side of the Table name you can see an arrow mark. Clicking on this arrow mark will expand the view and show the columns names/ fields that are available in the financials table.

 

 

Next to the Data Pane you can see another tab called Visualizations. Visualizations tab will show you the list of visuals that are available in power Bi. We even have an option to import custom visuals or download new visuals from Microsoft Power Bi store. We will cover these sections in detail  in coming blogs.

 

Now that we have the data imported let's see how to build the visuals and create a meaningful report.

As you can see in the above picture, we have a white space which says "Build Visuals with your data".

This is the place where you will be building the visuals using the data that we have. At the bottom of the page you can see Page 1. This is the page name and it can be changed by double clicking on the tab. Next to Page 1 you can see a "+" symbol which will add an additional page to the report.

Next you can select any visual from the Visualizations Tab. I am selecting a line chart for example. once we select a visual from the visualizations tab you will see that a new tile is getting added to our canvas page as shown in the below picture.

In the above picture, under visualizations tab we can see X-axis and Y-axis. We need to add the fields from our Data pane to complete the visual. For example let me show you the trend of sales over a period of time using the line chart. For that I am adding the sales field from data pane to Y-axis and Date field to X-axis.

Once you add the fields to X and Y- axis you can see the line chart getting populated with the values in our report canvas section. 

Similarly I will create another visual which will help you understand this even more better. This time I am going for Pie chart which will show us the distribution of sales over different countries. For that I am selecting a pie chart from the visualizations tab. 

You will see another tile getting added to our canvas section. Now let's add the fields to build the visual.

As shown in the above picture, I have added Country to legend section and sales field to the Values section and you can see the pie chart getting populated with the data.

This is how you build the visuals using the sample dataset in Power Bi. Hope this blog will help you understand and start building visuals for your report. 

Let me know if you have any questions. Also feel free to share your valuable feedback.

Thanks for Reading. Have a great day ahead :)