Overview of Power BI Desktop.

Once we have loaded our data into Power BI we can navigate around it in three different ways. We have Report View, we have data view, and model view.

Report View is where I will do most of the work, so we have the canvas where we'll build the visuals, a range of different chart types, and we have the field list available to work from.

From Report View we can switch to Data View and Data View is really useful because it lets us see our data it gives us a snapshot of what's contained in each of the columns.

We can easily do some formatting as well and we can have it use the filter to allow us to explore what each column contains.

Model View the third view is where we will join or relate tables together.

Let's do a workout and see how we can navigate it our way around Power BI.

So I'm going to use the Home tab and get data to connect to an Excel workbook and I'll just select the workbook. I want here click on open.

And then the Navigator will let me select the worksheet that I want. So let's just select this one here, click on load, and it's loaded into my Power BI report.

So I'm in Report View at the minute and Report View as we can see here gives us access to all the different visuals and the field list over to the right.

So for example, if I want to create a visual, I would select the relevant fields that I need. I'm going to select the Market Value field and I'd like to group it by asset class 1.

so you can see here I've already got a visual which I can just drag and drop by picking it up here or going to the corners and extending it out just to resize it.

If I click on to the canvas again, I can select another visual. I'm going to create a card this time, so I'll click on the visual icon first and then I'll use my Market Value USD field and I get a card which is giving me the total value for all of those rows.

So, that's our Report View.

Some other things we can do and Report View with the field list is for example rename a field if we right click over a field. We have a menu and from here I can rename it, so I'm just going to rename this field just to USD value.

We can even hide a field from Report View. Some fields aren't really that relevant to your analysis. So I'm just going to right-click here over ISIN and I'm going to hide it.

So it's not deleted it still exists in the dataset, but it's not seen in Report View.

If I use the icons down the left hand side, they allow me to switch between views. So I'm going to click on the middle one here which switches to Data View.

And here we have a snapshot of our data. So for example, I can click into the filter arrow here and explore what options exist in the column.

I can also see the field list and notice as well any hidden fields will appear in Data View. And if I want to do some formatting I can select a numeric field such as USD value and I can use the formatting tab on the ribbon. So for example, I might just change that to display in currency.

select currency there and we have it coming up with the dollar sign.

The third view is Model View, so if I just click on the third icon down here that will let me see my tables and if necessary I can relate or join them together.