How to create Power BI Charts
Power BI is a visualization software available under the umbrella of Power Platform. It accepts data from a wide variety of data sources and the chart can be embedded into other Microsoft products or any Web apps. This post is for beginners who started out their journey in Power BI.
Navigate to Power BI site, it is the landing page for your tenant. Create a workspace it acts as a container for the reports we are going to create.
Open Power BI Desktop to start creating reports, First we need to connect the data. In this case we are using dataverse as datasource.
There will be two modes to play with the data
- Import – All the data will be loaded to Power BI. But there will be limitations on the report refresh and dataset size.
- DirectQuery – Live connection with the database. But there are very limited options to transform the data.
The environment domain for the database will be available in the admin center of PowerApps, Select the environment, copy and paste it into the environment domain.
Let’s start with import mode, Select your table from the environment and click Load. When the table is loaded, along with the report, a dataset will be created to handle the data.
Transform Data is used to manipulate the data before it is passed into the report. For Eg: converting the values or getting data from two tables to merge it as one table. In this example, we changed the type from text to number.
Advanced Editor option shows the actual code behind the configuration, we can directly apply steps directly and it will be useful to change the environment while doing the environment migration.
Select a chart (we used bar chart for this example) from the right-hand side and map the X,Y axis. Based on the type of chart primary and secondary values can be passed. Chart customization can be done in the paint bar where the font size, color, title can be customized.
There are multiple options available to customize the values like we can show the sum, count, average of the selected axis. In this instance, we used count and sum and the Y-axis will change according to it.
Next, publish the chart in your workspace. Once published it will be available on the Power BI web.
Follow the same steps to create a “Direct Query” report.
As already said certain operations will not work for “Direct Query” mode in Transform data. It will show a message to convert the dataset to import mode.
Based on our experience, “Direct Query” will be suited to dynamic applications where data volume is more and needs a constant refresh.
The report data can be sorted for the selected axis.
Data refresh can be scheduled, If the data is to updated in a periodic manner refresh can be scheduled or if the refresh is disabled for the users and the system has to automatically refresh the report in such cases it will be useful.
The final step is to pin the report to a dashboard, this dashboard can be customized and can be embedded to other Microsoft products. We will see a detailed post in dashboard customization.
We have published a post to integrate Power BI in the Canvas app, Kindly have a look at it.
Please post your queries in the comment section. Happy Building š
