Your existing data holds insights that can help you to make more informed business decisions.

At Dataworks, we have the experience and expertise to use Microsoft Power BI dashboards to help you to find the Value in your Data by Visualizing, Analyzing and Transforming it into Actionable Insights. Microsoft Power BI is a reporting tool created by Microsoft (https://powerbi.microsoft.com).

In this article we will show you how the application allows you to create professionally presented dashboards quickly from several data sources. To demonstrate we will create a quick report/dashboard.

Some of you may be used to the Power BI tools in Excel, but there is a free standalone desktop Power BI as well as a licence server version. For this demonstration we will use the free version.

Upon launching Power BI, you will see a screen that looks something like this:

If you select the “Get Data” button you will be given several possible data sources (inlcuding Excel, database etc.). These can be mixed in the one report, but to keep things simple we will just use a database for this excercise.

Upon selecting a database, we can either import some data into our report file or just connect to it directly. Either way once it connects or imports you can begin to see tables and relationships as shown below:

Power BI will create any obvious relationships (e.g. from foreign keys) but if you like you can add your own. You can also add extra columns or measures if required.

Adding a chart can be achieved by picking a chart from the toolbar and then selecting the required fields:

You can also add legend and title information from the formatting menu.

Slicers are another useful feature. You can add these from the toolbar and set them to any field. Here we have a time slicer that is automatically filtering the entire report within a date range:

By continuing to add a few more charts and filters you can end up with a visually appealing dashboard or report in no time:

At Dataworks, we have the experience and expertise to use Power BI to its full capability allowing businesses to make sense of their data in a format that is visually appealing and accessible to all in the organisation.

We can work with you to help find the Value in your Data by Visualizing, Analyzing and Transforming it into Actionable Insights. To find out more Contact Us today or call us on 051 878 555.