2.2 Getting Started with Power BI Service
2.2.2 Understanding the Power BI Portal
I hope it took you five seconds or less to sign up with Power BI. (Or at least hopefully it feels quick.) After completing this signup steps, you’ll have access to the free edition of Power BI. Let’s take a moment to get familiar with the Power BI portal where you’ll spend most of your time when analyzing data.
Welcome to Power BI page
Upon signup, Power BI discovers that you don’t have any BI artifacts yet. This is why it navigates you to the “Welcome to Power BI” page which is shown in Figure 2.4.
NOTE Currently, the UI of the Power BI portal isn’t customizable. For example, you can’t rearrange or remove menus, and you can’t brand the portal. If these features are important to your organization, your IT department can
consider installing an on-premises SharePoint Server or SharePoint Online and them embed Power BI dashboards and reports inside SharePoint. SharePoint supports a comprehensive set of branding and UI customization features and you can embed Power BI content on SharePoint pages. I’ll discuss Power BI content embedding in Chapter 11.
Figure 2.4 The “Welcome to Power BI” page allows you to connect to data and install samples.
Before analyzing data, you need to first connect to wherever it resides. This is why the
“Welcome to Power BI” page prompts you to start your data journey by connecting to your data. The My Organization tile under the “Content Pack Library” section allows you to browse and use organizational packs, assuming that someone within your organization has already published BI content as organizational packs. The Services tile allows you to use Microsoft-provided content packs to connect to popular online services, such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and many more.
The Files tile under the “Import or Connect to Data” section lets you import data from
Excel, Power BI Desktop, and CSV files. The Databases tile allows you to connect to data sources that support live connections, such as Azure SQL Database and SQL Server
Analysis Services.
NOTE A popular option that’s missing on this page is connecting to an on-premises database, such a SQL Server or Oracle. Currently, this scenario requires you create a data model using Power BI Desktop or Excel before you can import data from on-premises databases. Power BI Desktop also supports connecting directly to some data sources, such as SQL Server. Then you can upload the model to Power BI. Because it’s a more advanced scenario, I’ll postpone discussing Power BI Desktop until Chapter 5.
1.To get some content you can explore in Power BI, click the Samples link.
2.In the Samples page, click the Retail Analysis Sample tile. As the popup informs you, the Retail Analysis Sample is a sample dashboard provided by Microsoft to demonstrate some of the Power BI capabilities. Click the Connect button. Are you concerned that samples might clutter the portal? Don’t worry; it’s easy to delete the sample later. To do this, you can just delete the Retail Analysis Sample dataset which will delete the
dependent reports and dashboards.
The Power BI portal
After installing the Retail Analysis Sample, Power BI navigates you to the home page, which has the following main sections (see the numbered areas in Figure 2.5):
1.Navigation Pane – The navigation pane organizes the content deployed to Power BI. By default, all content is deployed to your personal workspace (My Workspace). If you have a Power BI Pro subscription and you create other workspaces to collaborate with
coworkers, the My Workspace drop-down allows you to select another workspace. The Dashboards section includes the dashboards that you’ve developed or that someone shared with you. Similarly, the Reports section contains all reports that are available to you. Similarly, the Datasets section shows all the datasets that you’ve created or that someone shared with you. Finally, the Get Data button at the bottom brings you to the Get Data page. Similar to the “Welcome to Power BI” page, the Get Data page allows you to create additional datasets. Every dashboard, report, and dataset has a context menu which you can open by clicking the ellipsis button (…) to the right of the item. This context menu allows you to take additional actions, such as to rename the item.
Figure 2.5 The Power BI home page.
2.Office 365 Application Launcher – If you have an Office 365 subscription, this menu allows you to access the Office 365 application you are licensed to use. Doesn’t
Microsoft encourage you to use Office 365?
3.Power BI Home – No matter which page you’ve navigated to, this menu takes you to the main portal page (shown in Figure 2.5).
4.Application Toolbar – Let’s explain the available menus starting from the left:
Enter Full Screen Mode menu – Shows the active content in full screen and removes the Power BI UI (also called “chrome”). Once you’re in Full Screen mode, you have options to resize the content to fit to screen and to exit this mode (or press Esc). Another way to
open a dashboard in a full screen mode is to append the chromeless=1 parameter to the dashboard URL, such as:
https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/dashboards/3065afc5-63a5-4cab-bcd3-0160b3c5f741?chromeless=1
Settings menu – This menu expands to several submenus. Click “Manage Personal Storage” to check how much storage space you’ve used (recall that the Power BI Free and Power BI Pro editions have different storage limit). If you have Power BI Pro, the
“Create content pack” submenu allows you to create an organizational content pack (discussed in Chapter 9) while “View content pack” allows you to access published content packs. I mentioned how Power BI Service supersedes Power BI for Office 365 but in case you haven’t transitioned yet, the “The “Power BI for Office 365” submenu navigates you to Office 365 Power BI. Use the Settings submenu to view and change some Power BI Service settings, such as if the Q&A box is available for a given dashboard. The Dev Tools menu allows developers to create and test custom visuals.
TIP Not sure what Power BI edition you have? Click the Settings menu, and then click “Manage Personal Storage”. At the top of the next page, notice the message next to your name. If it says “Free User” you have the Power BI free edition.
If it says “Pro User” then you have Power BI Pro subscription.
Download menu – This menu allows you to download useful Power BI components, including Power BI Mobile (a set of native Power BI apps for your mobile devices), Power BI Desktop (for analysts wanting to create self-service data models), Analysis Services Connector (to connect to on-premises Analysis Services models), and Power BI gateways (to connect to on-premises data sources).
Help and Support menu – Includes several links to useful resources, such as product documentation, the community site, and developer resources.
Feedback menu – Rate your experience with Power BI on a scale from 1 to 10.
5.Dashboard name – Displays the dashboard name. The Share link to the right of the dashboard allows you to share a dashboard with your coworkers. And the ellipsis menu (…) to the right of the Share link lets you duplicate the dashboard.
6.Natural question box (Q&A) – When you select a dashboard and the dashboard uses a dataset that supports natural queries, you can use this box to enter the natural query. For example, you can ask it how many units were shipped in February last year.
7.Content area – This is where the content of the selected item in the navigation pane is shown. For example, if a dashboard is selected, the content pane shows the dashboard tiles.