Use visuals in Power BI

 

Introduction        

             Microsoft Power BI is a collection of apps, software services, and connectors that come together to turn unrelated data into visually impressive and interactive insights. Power BI can work with simple data sources like Microsoft Excel and complicated ones like cloud-based or on-premises hybrid Data warehouses. Power BI has the capabilities to easily connect to your data sources, visualize and share and publish your findings with anyone and everyone.

        As Power BI is a Microsoft product and has built-in connections to Excel, there are many functions that will be familiar to an Excel user.

        Power BI is one of the leading data visualization tools on the market. This current article is part of the Power BI like a Pro series written by TrueCue’s most experienced Power BI developers.

Create and customize simple visualizations

Two ways to create a new visualization in Power BI Desktop are:

Drag field names from the Fields pane and then drop them on the report canvas. By default, your visualization appears as a table of data.

In the Visualizations pane, select the type of visualization that you want to create. With this method, the default visual is a blank placeholder that resembles the type of visual that you selected.

Screenshot of a visual selected on the Visualizations pane.

After you have created your graph, map, or chart, you can begin dragging data fields onto the bottom portion of the Visualization pane to build and organize your visual. The available fields will change based on the type of visualization that you selected. As you drag and drop data fields, your visualization will automatically update to reflect changes.

You can resize your visual by selecting it and then dragging the handles in or out. You can also move your visualization anywhere on the canvas by selecting and then dragging it to where you want it. If you want to convert between different types of visuals, select the visual that you want to change and select a different visual from the Visualization pane. Power BI attempts to convert your selected fields to the new visual type as closely as possible.

As you hover over parts of your visuals, you'll receive a tooltip that contains details about that segment, such as labels and total value.

Select the paintbrush icon on the Visualizations pane to make cosmetic changes to your vision. Examples of cosmetic changes include background, alignment, title text, and data colors.

You can create slicers, maps, tables, charts, matrices, etc.