Looking for a tool to visualize your data? Nowadays, there are many tools that you can use to make data visually attractive. An old-school way to create graphs from data is by creating graphs in an MS Excel spreadsheet. However, there’s a more convenient and easy-to-learn technique to create graphs. And that is by visualizing data in Power BI.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence platform. The platform is similar to MS Excel. It allows users to transform, load, aggregate, visualize, analyze, and share data. Power BI is a service that has been provided by Microsoft. There’s both a desktop and a mobile version. It is a concept that has been released about 9 years ago (in 2011).

How does power bi compare to ms Excel?

At first glance, the data loading and the data transformation compares to MS Excel. In both Power BI and MS Excel, there’s an option in the ribbon named ‘Get Data’. If you select this option, you can retrieve data from a text/CSV file, a MS Access file, or another Excel file, etc. Also, both Power Queries have the same options to alter the data.

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A pro of using Power BI is that it is much faster in processing data then Excel. Also, Power BI could handle larger amounts of data, and for example KPI reports could be shared more easily than Excel KPI reports. On the contrary, MS Excel could better be used for in-depth data analysis.

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A brief power bi tutorial

Here’s an example of how Power BI works. The background data has been retrieved from the Kaggle Data Science Community dataset ‘Covid-19 in the USA’. The dataset contains data on the number of Covid-19 cases reported and reported deaths in each state from January to October 2020. To give an example of how to modify data in Power BI, some variables have been removed from the original dataset, or some variables have been added to the dataset. Besides, Power BI provides the option to build relationships between or among tables. It is similar to the relationships you can build with SQL. To transform the data, open the table in the Power Query first. The dataset includes a five-digit codes that has been assigned to each U.S. county. The variable is redundant for this model, so the variable has to be removed by clicking ‘remove column’.

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Aside from removing variables from the table, some variables should be classified as whole numbers, such as cases and deaths. You can transform the data type to whole numbers by selecting the column and reassign the data type by clicking the data type option in the ribbon.

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Now, let’s add a new variable and a new column. In the left corner, you can rename the table. Insert the formula to the column. Suppose that the odds that a person that has Covid-19 and should be hospitalized equals 40%. The number of cases should be multiplied by 0.4. The number of hospitalized persons should be rounded to whole numbers; you can adjust this in the data type.

There are 3 types of views in Power BI: the report view, the table view, and the model view. The report view is the main area to design a visual report, for example you can graphically display KPIs in this area. There are various visualizations options. The fields contain the input variables for the charts, and there’s an option to use data filters. You can insert slicers to display a subset of data.