Power BI Desktop is a desktop app for report preparation. It is free and offers a user-friendly interface for data visualization and management. Reports and dashboards do look good in the Power BI.
Data Visualization using Power BI Desktop
Report making used to be a job mainly for IT developers. Regular business users were not able to put hand on the data and edit it. Users like that did not even had a comfortable and easy-to-use tool to make their own report (that was only possible using paid professional platforms). But that is in the past. You can now do all of it on your own using cloud service Power BI (deployment environment) and a Power BI Desktop tool which enables you to create reports and upload them to the cloud.
This is how Power BI Desktop interface looks like:
And this is the final report. You can take a look at it in the picture below. Clicking on the picture will take you directly to the Power bi report.
The image and report is localized for Czech traffic and contains Czech captions … sorry for that, I’ll fix it soon
Power BI Desktop Tool Helps Prepare Data for Reporting
One can stand on their head but this is not doable without well-prepared data. Power BI consists of already mentioned platform for data handlink (data transformations) apart from visualization tools. You are able to create connection to bunch of data sources using simple interface (incl. web tables, your company’s database, excels, text files etc.), you can also edit the data afterwards. List of connectors is basically identical to connectors used by power query (more in article Power Query)
1) You can connect to Excel sheet and import table from there using connector
2) You can see the imported tables in the app so you can immediately create reports or…
3)..edit tables before reporting like in excel. App “remembers” list of the steps you have made with the table therefore it can repeat those steps after data update. You can see a demonstration of column name change in the picture. There is also a link to the list of steps (Applied steps) where the name change is visible.
4) Tables can be easily linked between each other in the data model
Comfy data editing into reportable form is a great benefit of Power bi desktop in my opinion.
