PL-300 – Section 32: Part 4 Section 1 – An Introduction to the Power BI Service Part 2

246. Power BI Terminology

In this video, we’re going to have a look at some of the key Power BI service terminology. And we’re going to start off with data sources.

Now, data sources are where your data has come from. So, it could be that it’s come from an Excel spreadsheet, a CSV, comma separated values file. It could be that it’s come from a database, maybe, an online database like Google Analytics, or as your SQL database for instance. Or indeed, maybe, even a database on your own local computer or server. So that is a data source. It is where the data is coming from. A data set, on the other hand, is the actual data itself. So, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. Once it’s been uploaded into Power BI, from various sources, it becomes data set.

So, let’s just have a quick look at that in our Power BI service. So in data sets, I can click on any of the data sets. For instance, my first visualisation, it won’t actually show the data itself. Maybe, it’s confidential data that you aren’t allowed to look at. Instead, it will show us what we can do with it. So, we can create a new visualisation or set of visualisations, or even multiple visualisations in multiple tabs.

Now, some people might call that a dashboard and quite frankly, I would too. But in Power BI, a set of visualisations, which are created from various data sets, like this one that we have previously created, in part one, is not actually called a dashboard. It is called a report. So, reports are created from multiple data sets, or, maybe, one data set, maybe, multiple data sets.

Now, we’ve also got something called workbooks. So, why am I listing that separately? Well, in the Power BI service, you can create your own reports. And you can create them from data sets. These may be data sets that you have uploaded as part of uploading a report. But you can also upload your own data.

Now, how you upload it may result in it being a data set. But it might be that if you upload an Excel spreadsheet in its entirety, it becomes a workbook. And from that workbook, you can then say, “Well, actually, I want this part of a workbook to be used in a report.” So, workbook’s a very special terminology in Power BI. They are Excel spreadsheets that you upload in their entirety to Power BI service for use in Excel Online, and then you use it in reports. So, the vast majority of the time, you will be actually using data sets, which then go into reports. So, if what we’ve created in these first three parts of this course, are not dashboards, then what on earth is a dashboard? Well, a dashboard is elements from reports. So, it could be that you’ve got three reports and multiple elements, multiple visualisations in each of them. And it might be say, actually, I want to create a new space, which has a bit from one, report, a bit from another report, and a bit from another. So, I’m just going to create a dashboard now. I’m going to go into my various reports. I’m going to say I want this particular visualisation to be part of it. So, you can see when I hover over any of these, that there’s a little pin symbol. That pin symbol says I want this visualisation to be part of a dashboard. So, I’m going to have this as a new dashboard, I have no existing dashboards. So, this is my dashboard demonstration. So, I’m going to pin this particular visualisation, not the entire report, not all of these tabs, these pages, just one particular visualisation. And if I now go to my dashboard demo, we can now see that visualisation. So, I’m going to go into other reports.

Now, these could have the same data set, these could have completely different data sets. So, I’m going to pin that into my dashboard. And I’m going to go into my practise activity as well, completely different data set, and pin that as well. So, now my dashboard contains three tiles from these reports. And you can see I can resize them. I can move them about. And I can do what I want to make my dashboard look, however, I want.

So, going back to my slideshow, you can see that a dashboard contains elements from reports. The reports themselves could have multiple data sets, the dashboards could have multiple reports. So in this Power BI service section, even though loosely, we can say that what we’ve created in Power BI Desktop, could be dashboards, we won’t be using that particular term for any of the files that we upload. Instead, we’ll be using the term report. So dashboards are elements from reports. So, we’ve got data sets, workbooks, data sources, reports and dashboards.

Needless to say, a dashboard needs the reports. The reports need either the workbooks or the data sets. If I delete the data sets, then by necessity, I’m going to have to delete the report. And I’m going to have to delete any of the tiles on the dashboards.

Now, these can all be stored in a workspace. And there are two sorts of workspaces. The first workspace is called my workspace. And this is the default that you can see here. So my workspace I have in there, the dashboard, four reports, no workbooks, I’ve not uploaded any data separately, and then I’ve got four data sets. So, that is my workspace.

However, you can have more than one workspace. So, why would you want more than one workspace? Well, you might want to share and collaborate content with colleagues. So in other words, let’s say I have 100 different data sets, I don’t necessarily want to share 100 different data sets with my colleagues, especially given that all I want to do is create say one dashboard with three reports and with five data sources.

Now, everything that is on my workspace is private. Only I have access to my workspace. I can share dashboards and reports for my workshop space, but by definition, by default, nobody else has access to my workspace. And I can’t collaborate on dashboards and reports, I can only share them. And again, these are words that Power BI has got special meaning. So, what’s the difference between share and collaborate? You can share an individual report and needless to say they’ll have access to what they need for it, for the data sets or the workbooks, but you collaborate on dashboards and reports, pleural. So, if I have one single report, I can share it. If I want to have an entire set of data sets, reports and dashboards, then sharing each individual one would be quite cumbersome. Instead, I would have a workspace for it.

Now, there’s also an app. So, these apps are not apps that you would have on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. It’s not that. Instead, these apps are another form of workspace. So, what is the difference between a workspace and an app? Well, apps are something that you publish. So, you have it in one particular form. And then you publish it, and people will see the same form until and unless you update the app. With workspaces it’s always live. So, let me go back. Let’s say that this dashboard demo is an actual workspace, which isn’t my workspace, an actual proper workspace. If I make an adjustment like this, then anyone who shares my workspace will see that adjustment. The app, however, you will not see this adjustment. It will stay into its old version, until and unless I decide to update the app.

So, you can see that the workspaces are for development purposes, the apps are more for the finished product that you really want to share. That’s basically the difference between the two. However, should say that workspaces and apps both rely on data. If the data is updated, then the data will be updated in the workspace, and the data will be updated in the app. It’s only when you change layouts. So, everything apart from the data that the app will not be changed, but the workspace will be changed. One other thing.

So, we’ve been talking about my workspace, workspaces other than my workspace and apps. Workspaces other than my workspace, and apps are only available in the pro version. The pro version of Power BI is there for sharing and for collaborating, and therefore, you only have access to the private version of my workspace. So, hopefully, now, you know the difference between a data set and a workbook. Why files that you create in Power BI Desktop aren’t called dashboards because the service Power BI service uses dashboards for excerpts or reports. And you know that there are two types of workspaces and apps and you know the difference between a workspace and an app. So, these are some key Power BI service terminology which if you’ve got it in your head very early on, makes the rest of this part a lot less confusing.

247. Datasets and Reports in the Power BI Service

In this video, we’re going to have a look at datasets and Reports and how they’re shown in the Power BI Service. So, here I’m back in the Power BI Service back at home, and you see that we have got dashboards, reports, workbooks, and dataset, and we can collapse any of those by just clicking on the word. So, here I’ve collapsed absolutely everything, but it’s a bit difficult to know why a dataset starts. So, it’s slightly involved, but I felt that could do a bit better with the emphasising of the headings here. So, if I click on any of the datasets, we don’t actually see the dataset itself. We see instead a blank report and you can use this just like you can use Power BI desktop.

Now, we’ve gone through in part one, of this course, how to create visualisations, how to create fields. It’s exactly the same thing. So, if I create a new visualisation here, I can drag it around. I’ve got the filters over here and that’s actually is a change from the early 2019 version filters were all the way down here in between the fields and drill through. And then I can say, have area code in the access and a measure as the values, for example, or could just check them. So, what’s have you want to do in Power BI desktop, you might be able to do here it’s a bit more restrictive. For example, you can say that, I can’t create new measures, I can create new calculated columns, I can’t do anything to model, this is the dataset that you are working with.

Now, I’m just going to add a newer visualisation. So, we can just have a bit of an explore. So, I’m going to put this as again, area and the detached change, put these side by side. So, we’ve got a couple of visualisations here, so let’s have a look on what we’ve got going across. So, we got visualisations and drill through going down. We’ve got fields going down. We’ve got filters going down. I think everybody’s probably very comfortable with that. Here in the file. We’ve got save this report. So, this will save this temporary post actually gives your name, save us, does a similar job, print, well that goes into your dialogue box for printing, and then we’ve got download the report, back at preview, you can see it is not enabled because this is only for reports that were created in Power BI desktop. Looking at the view, we have got quite a few things we can fit to page, fit to the width, or go actual size, so you can see actual size gives you this scroll bars, may not be what you want. We’ve got the high contrast colours that will be quite useful for accessibility. And you can see we’ve got various high contrast options here. And then we’ve got a series of viewing things like smart guides, grid lines, snap to grid, lock objects, and then the selection pane, the bookmarks pane and the sync slices pane.

So, quite a few things that we’ve got here in the view section of Power BI desktop. But as I said before, modelling isn’t there and getting new data isn’t there. And I think that’s probably the reason why Microsoft would prefer you to use Power BI desktop for any big new reporting needs. Going cross. We have the reading view. So, that gets rid. If I just save this report, I’ll just call it, delete me. So, I’ll delete it after the video after next. Here, we can see that the report is being shown without the fields pane, without all of the visualisations, to go back. It’s actually clicking on edit report. So, we have view reports. We have reading view, and then we have edit reports. It’s, maybe, a bit confusing, mobile layout, so this is why I wanted to create two layouts, two visualisations. So, here is how you can see it if you are on a mobile. So, I will drag out to visualisations I don’t have to have all two of them, but you can see that you can say, this is how I want it to look. If I’m using a mobile and to go back, you can have go to the reading view that was just looks at or the web layout that gets us back to our original starting point. Going further across, we have got asked a question. So, this is the Q&As interactivity that we’ve had before. So, they don’t ask the question about your data. So, what is the average price per area code, for example, and you can see, even though type the word per, it hasn’t been very responsive, but this is a good way to quickly get new visualisations. So, I’m just going to kick on the dot, and I’m going to renew that. Going further across explore. So, going through the dataset, again, not available for this particular report, text box, inserting shapes, buttons, showing visual interactions and whether filters effect other visuals. You can refresh the report, duplicate, so make a copy, save. And two additional items that weren’t available when we were just looking at a draught when we hadn’t clicked save pin a life page. So that pins it to the dashboard will have a video on that later on and share to team. So, if you’ve got Microsoft Teams installed, there’s also generate a QR codes. So, this will create a code that you can use to view the report directly from a mobile device, but only if your colleagues have got permission to see this report. So, this is part of the sharing, which is part of a Power BI Pro. And we’ve also got to analyse in Excel and again, I’m going to do a separate video on that.

Now, that this report, which are created from a dataset has been saved. The file menu has actually got a three more options, publish to web, export to PowerPoint and to export to PDF. So, this is one way of being able to share your analysis. Another way is to publish to the web. So, you can put your reports on a website for people to see. A quick look at the reading view because the top slightly changes. So, it’s just saving the report and you can see, we still have the file menu in the view menu much reduced because we’re not totally editing the report now. So anything to do with the visualisation of fields isn’t there, but we can also as well as pinning a live page and refreshing and sharing to teams, we can show a comments pane. So, this might be your comments. There might be other people’s comments. We can have a look at bookmarks. We covered what bookmarks were in the first part of this course. We can favourite it. Favourite it would mean it would be going onto the home page as a favourite. We can subscribe, so subscribe allows us to have changes notified, as you can see that a pro feature as is sharing this report. And we can also view related, but we’ll have a look at that in a later video.

So, in this video, we’ve had a look at both datasets, how it’s presented, it’s presented as I think you want to create a report and we’ve had a look at reports as well, and we’ve seen that you can edit the report. You can have it in your reading view. You can have it in a mobile layout, and if it’s not big enough for you to actually see everything, first of all, you’ve got this photo’s pane that can be reduced downwards. You can make sure you haven’t got any unnecessary panes shown, and you can press this view, this person which enters the full screen mode, and you can see the report without all the clutter. And in my particular browser, I press escape to exit and go back to my original view. So, this is looking at reports and data sets and the Power BI Service on just one other thing about terminology in part three of the course, we were referring to models and models and datasets are essentially the same thing. That’s minor of variance, depending on where you get the data from, if you got the data from certain types of databases, then you don’t need to model it. But in essence, what modelling in the Power BI desktop and what datasets are in the Power BI Service are basically one in the same.

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