Getting Started with Microsoft Power BI
Introduction
Visually representing data makes it easier to interpret and analyze data faster. Microsoft Power BI (the BI stands for “business intelligence”) is one of Microsoft’s power apps, a data visualization tool that helps transform data into understandable, visually immersive, and interactive insights.
Power BI is made up of two components: a Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop and an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service.
Power BI Desktop is a data analysis and report creation tool that you install for free on your local computer while Power BI service is a cloud-based service. It supports light report editing and collaboration for teams and organizations.
Power BI Desktop Environment
There are three views available in Power BI Desktop, which you select on the left side of the canvas.
- Report: In this view, you create reports and visuals.
- Data: In this view, you see the tables, measures, and other data used in the data model associated with your report, and transform the data for best use in the report’s model.
- Model: In this view, you see and manage the relationships among tables in your data model.
Zooming in on the report view, we have the filter, visualization and fields pane.
The fields pane contains information on your data set, the visualizations pane includes the different visuals used to gain insights from the data set and the filters pane is used to drill down and summarize on the visuals.
Loading your Data Set
Power BI can connect to various types of files. To load your data set. Click Get Data in the Home Tab and navigate to the file you need.
A preview of your data shows up with options to load, transform data or cancel. Loading takes the data into the data view of Power BI while transforming data opens up the Power Query Editor (it is used to connect to one or many data sources, shape and transform data). After transforming click close and apply to save changes.
Telling your Story
You have now loaded your data into Power BI! I would be using a data set pulled from four other datasets linked by time and place and was built to find signals correlated to increased suicide rates among different cohorts globally, across the socio-economic spectrum. You can find it here.
The first thing you want to do is look through your dataset using visuals by asking questions. You want to know what stories to tell. There is information on countries around the world, suicide numbers, population, GDP, age, generation and so on from 1985 - 2016. Since the data is on suicide rate, I would like to see how all these factors come together to affect those rates.
The First Question — What is the trend of suicide cases over the years, is it increasing, decreasing or flattening out?
I’m going to use a line graph to visualize this. A line graph is a type of graph used to show information over time.
We can see there has been a decrease in the numbers. To visualize this, we select the columns we need from the fields pane and choose the visualization we want.
We may want to see the total number of suicides in each country, to do that we can use a map visual. Here, the green dots represent the total suicide numbers in the different countries. We can add a slicer visual to drill down on the countries.
There are so many other questions to ask;
- How does GDP affect the suicide rates in the different countries? Does having a higher or lower GDP increase or decrease the suicide rate?
- Age and suicide rate, what’s the relationship? and so on…
It all boils down to understanding the story you want to tell, the message you’d like to pass across from the insights you got.
Share your Visualizations
There so many options to share with others the work you have done. You can export as a PowerPoint presentation, print a hard copy or even publish to the web!
I had so much fun interacting with my data through visuals, I hope you do too.
Do share, leave a comment and claps.
