March 1, 2021

Programmingempire

In this post first, let us understand What is Power Bi and Why is it Beneficial? Basically, Power BI is a service for data analytics provided by Microsoft. Also, the Power BI helps you get meaningful insight from your data that is otherwise very difficult to get. For instance, you may have data collected from several unrelated sources like excel sheets, SQL Server, or any other source. The Power BI allows you to load the data and then you can create a report or a dashboard.

Power BI and Power BI Desktop

Basically, Power BI Desktop is a free service from Microsoft that you can use for free for a period of 60 days before getting a subscription. As a matter of fact, the Power BI Desktop runs on a local computer. In contrast, Power BI is a cloud-based service.

Benefits of Power BI

In fact, Power BI is a software that provides Business Intelligence
You can get meaningful insights from your data.
Also, you can clean and transform your data.
Apart from Excel worksheets, Power BI provides several other ways to fetch data and use it in a coherent manner.
Power BI provides you the facility to visualize data using various kinds of charts.
The insights created using Power BI are usually interactive.
Additionally, you can create meaningful reports.
Moreover, you can get rich visualization, attractive dashboards as well as data cleaning and transforming services in one place.
It is highly flexible.
Finally, Power BI is very productive tool since it is simple and easy tolearn.

Getting Started with Power BI Desktop

For installing the Power BI, just go to the official Power BI website and find the link for Power BI Desktop. After that you can download Power BI Desktop and install it.

What is Power Bi and Why is it Beneficial? — **Installing Power BI**

After installing Power BI Desktop, you can launch it and import your dataset as shown below. In fact, you will get several options for importing the dataset. Since we have our dataset in the form of an Excel Worksheet, we will choose the first option. For the purpose of demonstration, we will use our Stroke Prediction Dataset available here.

Once the dataset is imported, we can load it by pressing the Load button as shown below.

After loading data we can view it as shown below. Henceforth, you get three tabs in the Navigator. As can be seen, you can either view the tabular data or the relationships. Moreover, you can also generate visualizations by selecting appropriate fields.

You can also click on the Relationship tab to view the relationships as shown below.

Visualization

In short, for creating visualizations we can select the fields from the right pane and then select a particular chart type. As an illustration, we select three fields – age, avg_glucose_level, and BMI. For the purpose of demonstration, we create the bar charts, line charts, and area charts as shown in the following two figures.

Bar and Column Charts

Line and Area Charts

Summary

In this article on What is Power Bi and Why is it Beneficial? I have covered the basic overview of Power BI and Power BI Desktop. Also, the main benefits of using Power BI are provided. After that, installation and working with Power BI is explained. Finally, an example of loading a dataset and creating visualizations is also covered. In the future posts, I will explain how to create reports and dashboards.