Introduction to Power BI Desktop’s Report View

Learn how to navigate Power BI Desktop’s Report View

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about one of Power BI’s three main views, the Report view. Learn how to insert visualizations using the Visualizations pane, format them in the Format visual pane, and select fields for your visualizations using the Data pane.

Hi. This is Matt with Playfair+. In this video, we’re going to demonstrate some of the key features in Power BI Desktop’s Report View. Now this is the main view you would probably think of when you see Power BI Desktop and you’re creating visualizations. So it’s important to know where things are, how to change formatting, change which tools you’re using.

So let’s dive in and take a look at some of the best features in Power BI Desktop’s Report view. This is where we’re going to spend hopefully 90% of your time. If you’ve got a rough data set, maybe it’s like 70 to 80% of your time, but this is where we’re spending most of our time. So we have our Home ribbon at the top, where we’re able to connect the data.

You know, we’re looking to refresh our data model, we’re adding things in. So whether we’re using Insert tab to put a text box or buttons and shapes, and we’ll get into some of that later. Our Modeling view allows us to create our measures and new columns, our calculated columns, even building out a new table, which we will do this afternoon.

And, you know, View is we’re looking at some of our themes. I think there was a JSON download available to you guys if you wanted to use the same color scheme that I’m using. I have a Playfair Data custom theme that I’m using for this. At the end, if we have some extra time, I’m happy to take people through how to bring in their JSON file for this.

Go ahead and put a message in the chat if that’s something you’d like us to spend some time on. Certainly able to do that. Optimize is really a performance analyzer. We won’t run into that today. But we’ll get back to our home screen. So let’s talk through. The next step we want to do is the Visualization pane.

I’m going to throw a quick example on here just so that we can have all three options available. But this is really where we’re looking at building our visuals. So the Viz pane is broken up into three pieces. There’s Build, Format, and Analyze. So, you’ve got, all of your options here. And let’s say we wanted to build a stacked bar chart.

That’s the example I have selected on the slide. Alright. We could take Country-Region and throw it onto the x-Axis and I think that that’s in SalesTerritory. Well, nope, it’s in Customer. So that goes on the x-Axis and then looks like we have Sales Amount thrown on the y-Axis. So we’ll go to our Sales table, take Sales Amount, put it on the y-Axis, and you can see we get a chart.

It shows up. So it is here. And then, Legend is Category, so it’s another way to split things up. So we are looking at our Product table, and we’ll go ahead and put Category on Legend and you can kind of see the stack creating. So, it’s interesting, all of these tables. They’re separate, but they are connected because of our data models.

We’ve done that work in the Model view. We’ve made sure we’re able to pull information from three separate tables onto one visualization here. So, it’s really a great start. You can see that with Build. And then if I wanted to change any of the colors, we’re going to get into this specifically in our exercise examples, but the format pane, and we’ll go back over to the slides.

You can kind of see all of this. You can see we’ve got our Legend turned on. Total labels turned on, and then the next one over is our Analytics pane. And then different visualizations have different options available. But you can add constant lines, you can add average lines, you can do, really, additional pieces of analysis really out-of-the-box with Power BI, without having to write any custom DAX, without having to perform a kind of like, a deeper level of analysis. You can get that information right away. It’s really helpful to see. So, those custom lines are great. And then this is a split view of the Data pane over on the right-hand side. So when you say the Data pane, this is where your tables live.

In the Report view, we’ve got seven tables, and you can see in this Sales example. We have some of our options. Some of our columns are numerical columns that have this special icon next to them. The most sold category. This is a calculated, or this is a measure. You see the calculator. Profit column, which we’ve created is a calculated column.

So it’s our custom column that we created has a different icon. And you can see over on the date field, on the Date table, we have custom images for anything that’s a date category. So if it’s categorically that information, you’re able to quickly identify, alright, I’m looking for a date field.

I found it full month, full date. Thanks for watching. I hope you have a good understanding of some of the main features on Power BI Desktop’s Report view. It’s an important place to start and you’ll get more familiar with it the more you use the tool. So go ahead and dive in as often as possible.

Thanks for watching at Playfair+.