The Datasets tab is selected on the Settings page that appears.

In the right pane, select the arrow next to Scheduled refresh to expand that section. The Settings dialog box
appears on the canvas, letting you set the update settings that meet your needs.

That's enough for our quick look at the Power BI service. There are many more things you can do with the service, and we'll cover these later in this module and in upcoming
modules. Also, remember that there are many types of data you can connect to, and all sorts of apps, with more of both coming all the time.

Next unit: Summary

Summary
• 5 minutes
Let's do a quick review of what we covered in this module.
Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your data into interactive insights. You can use data from single basic
sources, like a Microsoft Excel workbook, or pull in data from multiple databases and cloud sources to create complex datasets and reports. Power BI can be as straightforward
as you want or as enterprise-ready as your complex global business requires.
Power BI consists of three main elements—Power BI Desktop, the Power BI service, and Power BI Mobile—which work together to let you create, interact with, share, and
consume your data the way you want.

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We also discussed the basic building blocks in Power BI:
• Visualizations – A visual representation of data, sometimes just called visuals
• Datasets – A collection of data that Power BI uses to create visualizations
• Reports – A collection of visuals from a dataset, spanning one or more pages
• Dashboards – A single-page collection of visuals built from a report
• Tiles – A single visualization on a report or dashboard
In the Power BI service, we installed an app in just a few clicks. That app, a ready-made collection of visuals and reports, let us easily connect to a software service to
populate the app and bring that data to life.
Finally, we set up a refresh schedule for our data, so that we know the data will be fresh when we go back to the Power BI service.
Next steps
Congratulations! You've finished the first module of the learning path for Power BI. You now have a firm foundation of knowledge for when you move on to the next module,
which walks through the steps to create your first report.
We mentioned this before, but it's worth restating: this learning path builds your knowledge by following the common flow of work in Power BI:
• Bring data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report.
• Publish to the Power BI service, where you create new visualizations or build dashboards.
• Share your dashboards with others, especially people who are on the go.
• View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in Power BI Mobile apps.

You might not do all that work yourself—some people will only view dashboards that were created by someone else, and they'll just use the service. That's fine, and we'll soon
have a module dedicated to showing how you can easily navigate and use the Power BI service to view and interact with reports and apps.
But the next module follows the flow of work in Power BI, showing you how to create a report and publish it to the Power BI service. You'll learn how those reports and dashboards
are created and how they connected to the data. You might even decide to create a report or dashboard of your own.
See you in the next module!

Next unit: Check your knowledge

Check your knowledge

• 10 minutes
Knowledge check: Get started with Power BI
1. What is the common flow of activity in Power BI?

Create a report in Power BI mobile, share it to the Power BI Desktop, view and interact in the Power BI service.

Create a report in the Power BI service, share it to Power BI mobile, interact with it in Power BI Desktop.

Bring data into Power BI Desktop and create a report, share it to the Power BI service, view and interact with reports and dashboards in the service and Power BI mobile.

Bring data into Power BI mobile, create a report, then share it to Power BI Desktop.
2. Which of the following are building blocks of Power BI?

Tiles, dashboards, databases, mobile devices.

Visualizations, datasets, reports, dashboards, tiles.

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 Visual Studio, C#, and JSON files.
3. A collection of ready-made visuals, pre-arranged in dashboards and reports is called what in Power BI?

The canvas.

Scheduled refresh.

An app.

GETTING DATA

Overview of Power BI Desktop

• 45 minutes remaining
Welcome to the second section in this Guided Learning course for Power BI, called Getting Data. This section looks at the many data-centric features and tools of Power BI,
focusing on Power BI Desktop. Many of these tools also apply to the Power BI service, so you're doing double duty with your learning in this section.
When you get data, sometimes it's not quite as well-formed, or clean, as you want it to be. So in this section you learn how to get data, how to clean it up (sometimes called
cleaning or transforming data), and also learn some advanced tricks that can make your data-getting life easier.
As always in this course, your learning journey follows the same path as the flow of work in Power BI. As such, let's check out Power BI Desktop, where it often begins.
An overview of Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is a tool to connect to, clean, and visualize your data. With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to data and then model and visualize it in different ways. Most
users who are working on Business Intelligence projects will spend the majority of their time using Power BI Desktop.
You can download Power BI Desktop from the web, you can also install Power BI Desktop as an app from the Windows Store, or you can download it from the Power BI
service. In the service, to get Power BI Desktop you just select the down arrow button in the upper right side of Power BI, then select Power BI Desktop.

Power BI Desktop installs as an application on your Windows computer.

So once you download it, you'll install Power BI Desktop and run it like other applications on Windows. The following image shows the Start Screen of Power BI Desktop, which
appears when you start the application.

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Power BI Desktop connects to a wide variety of data sources, from local on-premises databases to Excel worksheets to cloud services. It helps you clean and format your data
to make it more usable, including splitting and renaming columns, changing data types, and working with dates. You can also create relationships between columns so that it's
easier to model and analyze your data.

Getting started with Power BI Desktop

• 41 minutes remaining
In this topic, we take a closer look at how the first two parts of Power BI fit together:
• Create a report in Power BI Desktop
• Publish the report in the Power BI service
We’ll start in Power BI Desktop, and select Get Data. The collection of data sources appears, allowing you to choose a data source. The following image shows selecting a
Web page as the source, in the video above, Will selected an Excel workbook.

Regardless of which data source you choose, Power BI connects to that data source, and shows you the data available from that source. The following image is another
example, this one is from a Web page that analyzes different states and some interesting retirement statistics.

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In Power BI Desktop Report view, you can begin to build reports.
The Report view has five main areas:
1. The ribbon, which displays common tasks associated with reports and visualizations
2. The Report view, or canvas, where visualizations are created and arranged
3. The Pages tab area along the bottom, which lets you select or add a report page
4. The Visualizations pane, where you can change visualizations, customize colors or axes, apply filters, drag fields, and more
5. The Fields pane, where query elements and filters can be dragged onto the Report view, or dragged to the Filters area of the Visualizations pane

The Visualizations and Fields pane can be collapsed by selecting the small arrow along the edge, providing more space in the Report view to build cool visualizations. When
modifying visualizations, you'll also see these arrows pointing up or down, which means you can expand or collapse that section, accordingly.

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To create a visualization, just drag a field from the Fields list onto the Report view. In this case, let’s drag the State field from RetirementStats, and see what happens.

Look at that... Power BI Desktop automatically created a map-based visualization, because it recognized that the State field contained geolocation data.
Now let’s fast-forward a bit, and after creating a report with a few visualizations, we’re ready to publish this to the Power BI service. On the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop,
select Publish.

You’ll be prompted to sign in to Power BI.

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When you've signed in and the publish process is complete, you see the following dialog. You can select the link (below Success!) to be taken to the Power BI service, where
you can see the report you just published.

When you sign in to Power BI, you'll see Power BI Desktop file you just published in the service. In the image below, the report created in Power BI Desktop is shown in the
Reports section.

In that report, I can choose the Pin icon to pin that visual to a dashboard. The following image shows the pin icon highlighted with a bright box and arrow.

When I select that, the following dialog appears, letting me pin the visual to an existing dashboard, or to create a new dashboard.

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When we pin a couple of visuals from our report, we can see them in the dashboard.

There’s a lot more you can do with Power BI, of course, such as sharing the dashboards you create. We'll discuss sharing later on in this course.
Next, we look at a feature that can automatically create dashboards for you, just by connecting to a cloud service like Facebook, Salesforce, and many others.

Connect to data sources in Power BI Desktop

• 32 minutes remaining
Power BI Desktop can connect to a whole range of data sources, including on-premises databases, Excel workbooks, and cloud services. Currently, over 59 different cloud
services such as GitHub and Marketo have specific connectors, and you can connect to generic sources through XML, CSV, text, and ODBC. Power BI will even scrape tabular
data directly from a website URL! But let's start from the beginning, with opening Power BI Desktop and connecting to data.
When you start Power BI Desktop and move past the Start Screen, you can choose Get Data from the ribbon on the Home tab.

There are monthly updates to Power BI Desktop, and with each update, the Power BI Desktop What's New page gets updated with information about the updates, links to the
blog, and a download link.
In Power BI Desktop, there are all sorts of different data sources available. Select a source to establish a connection. Depending on your selection, you will be asked to find the
source on your computer or network, or be prompted to sign in to a service to authenticate your request.

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After connecting, the first window you'll see is the Navigator. The Navigator displays the tables or entities of your data source, and clicking on one gives you a preview of its
contents. You can then import your selected tables or entities immediately, or select Edit to transform and clean your data before importing.

Once you've selected the tables you'd like to bring into Power BI Desktop, you can choose to load them into Power BI Desktop by selecting the Load button in the bottom right
corner of Navigator. There are times, however, where you might want to make changes to those tables before you load them into Power BI Desktop. You might want only a
subset of customers, or filter that data for sales that occurred only in a specific country. In those cases, you can select the Edit button and filter or transform that data before
bringing it all into Power BI Desktop.

We'll pick up there, and edit our data, in the next section.

Clean and transform your data with the Query Editor

• 24 minutes remaining
Power BI Desktop includes Query Editor, a powerful tool for shaping and transforming data so it's ready for your models and visualizations. When you select Edit from
Navigator, Query Editor launches and is populated with the tables or other entities you selected from your data source.
You can also launch Query Editor directly from Power BI Desktop, using the Edit Queries button on the Home ribbon.

Once Query Editor is loaded with data that's ready for you to shape, you see a handful of sections:
1. In the ribbon, many buttons are now active to interact with the data in the query
2. In the left pane, queries (one for each table, or entity) are listed and available for selection, viewing, and shaping
3. In the center pane, data from the selected query is displayed and available for shaping
4. The Query Settings window appears, listing the query’s properties and applied steps

In the center pane, right-clicking on a column displays a number of different available transformations, such as removing the column from the table, duplicating the column under
a new name, and replacing values. From this menu you can also split text columns into multiples by common delimiters.

The Query Editor ribbon contains additional tools, such as changing the data type of columns, adding scientific notation, or extracting elements from dates, such as day of the
week.

As you apply transformations, each step appears in the Applied Steps list in the Query Settings pane on the right side of Query Editor. You can use this list to undo or review
specific changes, or even change the name of a step. To save your transformations, select Close & Apply on the Home tab.

Once you select Close & Apply, Query Editor applies the query changes you made, and applies them to Power BI Desktop.

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There are all sorts of things you can do when transforming data in Query Editor, including advanced transformations. In the next section, we take a look at a few of those
advanced transformations, to give you a sense of the almost immeasurable ways you can transform your data with Query Editor.

More advanced data sources and transformation

• 16 minutes remaining
In this article, we investigate some advanced data import and cleaning techniques for Power BI Desktop. Once you've shaped your data in Query Editor and brought it into
Power BI Desktop, you can look at it in a few different ways. There are three views in Power BI Desktop: Report view, Data view, and Relationships view. You see each view
by selecting its icon in the upper left side of the canvas. In the following image, Report view is selected. The yellow bar beside the icon indicates which view is active.

To change the view, just select either of other two icons. The yellow bar beside the icon indicates which view is active.
Power BI Desktop can combine data from multiple sources into a single report, at any time during the modelling process. To add additional sources to an existing report, select
Edit Queries in the Home ribbon and then select New Source in Query Editor.
There are many different possible data sources you can use in Power BI Desktop, including Folders. By connecting to a folder, you can import data from multiple files at once,
such as a series of Excel files or CSV files. The files contained within your selected folder appear in Query Editor as binary content, and clicking the double-arrow icon at the
top of the Content column loads their values.

One of Power BI's most useful tools is its Filters. For example, selecting the drop-down arrow next to a column opens a checklist of text filters that you can use to remove values
from your model.
You can also merge and append queries, and turn multiple tables (or data from various files, in folders) into a single table that contains just the data you want. You can use the
Append Queries tool to add the data from a new table to an existing query. Power BI Desktop attempt to match up the columns in your queries, which you can then adjust as
necessary in Query Editor.

Finally, the Add Custom Column tool gives advanced users the option of writing query expressions from scratch using the powerful M language. You can add a custom column
based on M query language statements, and get your data just the way you want it.

Cleaning irregularly formatted data

• 8 minutes remaining
While Power BI can import your data from almost any source, its visualization and modeling tools work best with columnar data. Sometimes your data will not be formatted in
simple columns, which is often the case with Excel spreadsheets, where a table layout that looks good to the human eye is not necessarily optimal for automated queries. For
example, the following spreadsheet has headers that span multiple columns.

Fortunately, Power BI has tools to quickly transform multi-column tables into datasets that you can use.
Transpose data
For example, using Transpose in Query Editor, you can flip data (turn columns to rows, and rows into columns) so you can break data down into formats that you can
manipulate.

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