Right below the menu with visualization tools there is a set of three icons that allows us to enter one of the three menus that will be shown at the bottom of this panel. They are called Fields, Formats, and Analytics. First shows all the fields that affect appearance of a visual, second has options for its formatting and the third contains functionalities by which we can improve the chart: trend line, constant, minimum, maximum, average and forecast …
Various visuals, whether they are tables, cards or charts, have different fields that can be used to adjust their look within the report. We perform this action by dragging dimensions and measures to these fields. In this “recipe” you will be shown usage of fields, depending of common visuals, and how to use them to form quality reports.
Purpose of PowerBI Desktop application is to create reports on a local machine and publish them in the cloud for users who can see them anytime, at any moment, by Internet browser on a PC or a mobile device. Managers need to get clear, simple and visually nice reports. It seems that PowerBI meets all given criteria. In a text that follows I will describe various ways to create reports in PowerBI Desktop.
PowerBI Desktop application allows you to import data from many sources: file, database, BI solution, “Big“ (unstructured) data, Microsoft “cloud” (Azure), the web page … Given the fact that there is no good report without quality data I think it is appropriate to devote one recipe especially to this problem. Below, I’ll show you how, with the help PowerBI Desktop you can import, purge and combine various data.
In one of the earlier posts I wrote about that PowerBI comes in many “flavors”: as a Cloud Service (PowerBI.com) as a development environment (PowerBI Desktop), as application for mobile devices available on Windows, Android and iOS platforms (PowerBI Mobile). Since the majority of you who are reading these lines deal with reports development I decided to demonstrate you, in a practical example, how to use PowerBI Desktop.