Learning Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 2. The Report and Data Views

Power BI Desktop is a robust data visualization tool that allows you to take your data and create visualized insights from it in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we’ll go over the basics of the Power BI Desktop interface, specifically looking at the Report and Data views.

This will be a detailed dive into the User Interface, so stay with me. Parts of this chapter might be a bit dry since I’m going to concentrate on what the UI does, not necessarily on how we’ll use it.

A majority of our focus will be on the Report view because that’s where you’ll be working the most. Plus, the Report view has the largest number of elements to interact with. The two most important things you need to know about within the UI are the functions of the Home tab of the ribbon and the Visualizations pane, so keep that in mind as you read.

Microsoft said its goal for Power BI Desktop was to make it “PowerPoint for your data.” As of the writing of this book, you can see that Power BI has adopted many design principles from other tools in the Microsoft Office family, PowerPoint included.

If you’ve used any other Microsoft Office product since 2010, you’ve seen some version of the ribbon UI in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other products. Having that familiarity with the interface gives you an advantage, but the Power BI user interface does have some quirks. Now and then, you’ll see that Power BI will add and remove items from the ribbon based on ...