Building visuals in Power BI using a Mac.

If you have a Mac, you cannot download the Power BI desktop, however, it is still possible to create visuals using the browser version. This workout will show you how to get started in the cloud service and connect to an Excel file. So you can create some visuals from your data using a Mac.

The first thing I'm going to do is open the Excel file that I want to use, so I'm just going to open Company Revenue here because there is one feature that we do have to add to the Excel file before we can connect to it through the browser and that is setting up format as table.

Now it doesn't really matter what color scheme we choose here. I'm just going to click into my dataset go to the Home tab format as table. Just pick an option and just click on OK.

So that gives a particular structure to the Excel file that the browser can then use. So I'm just going to save my changes and close the file down.

So I'm not going to switch to the browser, so I've logged into the Power BI cloud service using my account details and I'm going to go down to the very far bottom left and use get data.

So from here I can connect to an Excel file, so I'm going to click on get here under create new content.

And the file I'm using is a local files, so if I choose that and select company revenue and then click on open.

So it's much better to use the import option, that way we can create some visuals and so on. However, if we use the import option, we must have our data set formatted as a table. So we've already done that. I can click on import here and it should come in right away.

So I have content where it has built a dashboard for me called Company Revenue, but what I need to do is go to the dataset section and use company revenue from here. And if I click on the ellipsis the three dots beside the Company Revenue name, I can go straight to create report and when I click on that it will take me in to a screen that we would have in the Power BI desktop version if it was downloaded on a PC.

From here we can do all that we would normally do on the desktop version. So for example, if I open up my table here I could create a visual using the revenue field and the industry.

Right away, we have a column chart if I just expand that out. I can go to the visualizations pane and I could change it for instance to a clustered bar chart and I have my formatting section as well which allows me to change the chart. For instance. I could put a chart title on just by going to General in here and adding my own chart title.

So once we're into the Power BI screen, it's exactly the same as we would have on the desktop. It's just a little different getting to that point.