PL-300 – Section 32: Part 4 Section 1 – An Introduction to the Power BI Service Part 3

248. Get Data – Other People’s Data

In the previous video, we had a look at datasets and reports, but what if you wanted to bring in data yourself? So, instead of having a dataset that, perhaps, we brought in from Power BI Desktop, how can you bring one in? And we have at this bottom left Get Data. So notice what it says at the top. Please use Power BI Desktop. So, that’s the one that they recommend you to use. However, you cannot bring in data. First of all, we have My Organisation. So, these are any apps that are published.

So, you remember, from a previous video, that apps are a way of packaging, datasets, reports, dashboards, maybe, a few other things as well. Now, this, My Organisation apps is exactly the same thing as this link down here, organisational content packs. So, I’ll click this and we have all of your organisational packs that are here. Exactly the same thing if you click on the other link. Service content packs, they are provided from a company who provides a service. So, this could be Google, Analytics, MailChimp, and so forth and they will show in exactly the same place.

Now, you may notice that we’ve got the two additional tabs at the top. Template apps and all apps, and all apps would be the organisation. Plus the template apps. And we can get to that as well through these services. So, if I click on services and get, we get to exactly the same thing. So, you can see there’s a fair bit of duplication in what we’ve seen so far. So, these are apps again, they’re datasets reports, dashboards that have been created by third parties for use in your organisation. Whether you find them actually useful is another matter. But you can feel free to have a look at it, just hover over them and see what is included. So, if I was to click on one, it gives me more information about it, or at least that’s what should be happening. And then you can install it as you see fit. Not currently working on my version, but you can see here, we’ve got some information about it.

So, that is another way of getting data. We have samples. Samples will allow you to download various data sets. So, if I click on the consumer profitability sample, you can see that it has installed a dashboard, which has a report, which has a workbook, which has the dataset. So, if I click on this, then this is a quick way to be able to see. And you can see at the top, it says refreshing data, one possible presentation for dashboards and for reports and so forth. So, this is a report. For instance, you can see they’ve applied lots of filters and they’ve got the data sets from which you can create your own reports if you so wish.

Now, there are also a partner showcase. So, this isn’t necessarily data. This could also be services as well. For example, you can see, we have some affordable and predictable packaged services, such as power BI training for beginners, a two-day workshop at about $3,000. And you can see what we’re creating here in this course, not too dissimilar. On the right hand side, we have got databases.

Now, again, there’s a fair bit of duplication in this. We see, for instance we have got Azure SQL database, Azure SQL data warehouse. I click on it and it says, do this from power BI desktop. So really there is very little here and SQL server analytical services SSAS, it’s saying it’s depreciated. In other words, we will not be supporting this in the future. So, there’s a fair bit from here that could actually not for used. And nobody wouldn’t really know the difference. Really. You need one button for discover content. The samples may be the partner work showcase and that’s it. So far, they published data sets that said, these are your existing debt sets, but you can get those in the, my workspace and workspaces section could be quite useful if you’ve got a lot of workspaces and you were getting confused as to what sources you have got.

So, these are all of the get data from other people’s data. In the next video, we’ll have a look at really the big thing that matters apart from getting data from your own organisation on external data. And that is your own data.

249. Get Data – Your Data

In the previous video, we got other people’s data, in this video, we’re going to get your own data.

So, I’ve clicked on it, get data in the bottom left hand corner. And we are going to the file section, bring in your reports, Workbooks, or data from Excel Power BI Desktop or CSV (Comma Separated Value) files. And we’ve got five options, and this fifth one, it’s actually just a hyperlink to get to two pretty nice read to be honest, if you’re at all confused. So, really we’ve got four options, two of them look the same, OneDrive business and OneDrive personal. The major difference between OneDrive business and OneDrive personal, if you don’t know OneDrive is, it’s a way of having files on the Cloud, on Microsoft Cloud. The difference is that business is more integrated with power BI. It’s the same signing process. So, if I click OneDrive business, I would be getting to my OneDrive for Business data at it exists. but it doesn’t exist. So, it’s saying, we just waiting for it to exist, while it doesn’t. But if you subscribed to OneDrive business, all of your files will be there. OneDrive personal, click on it. You may need to have a popup box being shown, but then you have to signing with your Microsoft account. That’s really the only difference between these two.

Now, business and personal OneDrive, they’re on the Cloud, Microsoft have access to them. So, what’s happens when your data changes? Well, every hour power BI will connect to your files and change the dataset in power BI. So, you changed something in OneDrive and up to 60 minutes later, it is reflected into power BI. SharePoint team, again, this is a way for being able to save files. Not to same way as OneDrive for business, they made a difference is that you have to select a URL website essentially, how you connect to the file and then you can connect to the root folder or that sort of thing. So OneDrive business, OneDrive personal SharePoint they’re online, OneDrive business will automatically refresh every hour so. So, let’s say you haven’t got any of that, we’re going to connect to a local file and there are two options. First of all, I need to actually get to the local file. So, I’ve created a file called Get Data, It’s a completely blank file and I’m not going to make it really that difficult to file. So, it’s going to have first heading, second heading, and I’m going to put letters here and I’m going to put numbers here. Notice I haven’t put it at the top, just put it elsewhere, just to be awkward. So, I’m going to save that and close that. Right, so I’m going to load in this Get Data and there were two methods of connecting. First of all, I can bring in the data. So, what the computer’s going to do, is going to open Excel. It’s going to say “this is a dataset and import it,” and then that’s it, the data is there.

The alternative is to upload the entirety of the Excel file and put it into Excel online as a Workbook. So, just to clarify, if you import the data, it becomes a dataset and you can use the datasets to create reports and elements, visualisations of the reports or entire pages can be used in dashboards. If you bring in the entirety, so not just the data, but the entirety of this Workbook, it becomes a Workbook, and you can’t create a report from what power BI Service calls a Workbook. However, what you can do is highlight a range and pin it to a dashboard. So that there’s a bit of a difference there.

So, let’s now try importing the Excel data that we’ve got, and we have a problem, we couldn’t find any data formatted as a table. So, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t quite at the top, if I had moved it right to the top, save, close, re-import. So, this is importing, still a problem, nothing is there as a table. So to get it as a table, I have to go into Excel, I’m going to save a second copy of this. I’m going to call this Import, so we still have the original file uploading, and I’m going to highlight my table and I’m going to press it. It says Ctrl+T, I can also press Cntrl+Lfor a table. That was an oldest shortcut at the time we’re used to, or I can go to insert table. I have a way we get this dialogue box. “Where is your dataset?” “Does my table of headers…” Click okay. And that’s what computer needs. So nanos, this is a table.

Now, talk about this extensively in the Excel courses, this isn’t an Excel course. Just know that you need to actually make it table. So, I’m going to save this and I’m going to import it yet again. So, there is my Import, click on Import, and it could take a while, and there it is. So, I’m going to view my new dataset, which is available in the datasets section as the Get Data Import, but I’ll click on View Dataset, and now I can create everything from first heading second, second heading and so forth. So my data is now available. So, I’m going to delete this, because I’m not actually wanted to use it and to delete it, I click on the double dot next to it. And I go to Delete. So, you can see, are you sure you want to permanently delete this dataset? If you’ve got any reports or dashboard tiles from the dataset, that will also be deleted, since obviously the reports rely on the dataset and the dashboard tiles rely on the reports. So, I’m going to click Delete and it’s gone. So, now let’s have a look at the alternative way of bring it in. And I click on Get, Local File, I go to my original one, so why it’s not a table and I’m uploading it. And you can see, you can interact with it just like you would on Excel online. So, here is my Workbook, GetData, click on it. And it takes us to Excel align. Where you can see the Workbook and what’s really annoying is you can’t make reports for it, you can’t create this into a dataset. However, you can put this into a dashboard. So, if I make my selection and you can see the very little options that you can have. So Edit doesn’t work for instance, it says “editing is not supported for files uploaded from a local drive.” So, I can just pin it in to a dashboard. I’ll create a brand new dashboard, MyDashboard, I’m just going to call it, I’m going to click Pin. And if I go to the dashboard, you will be able to see that we have that data in.

Now, if I want to replace it, then I go to Workspaces. MyDashboards say I’ve got a latest version in my computer. So, let’s as we do that, let’s go to GetData, add an extra row, row E, heading five, second heading five. So, I’ll say that I will go to my Workbooks and I will click, this is Refresh now, Refresh now doesn’t actually do anything because it just refreshes from its own local cache. We have settings which just give you options to change the Workbook name and we can delete, but we have this little arrow which is Replace File. So, if I replace the existing online file with my new file, that is on my local and click on GetData, that is just now being expanded.

Now, one other thing that’s probably of interest. When I pin something to a dashboard from a Workbook, it doesn’t get refreshed. So, I’ve just changed this fourth line from a C3 to C13. I haven’t uploaded it yet, but you’ll see in my dashboard, it says C3. I’m now going to go back into my Workspace, I’m going to go back into Workbooks, I’m going to replace the file again, which now says, C13. And we can see it now says, C13. However, if I go back into MyDashboard, we have the old version. So, the pin from Workbooks is pinned as it currently is, it doesn’t get updated once a data is updated. So that for me makes Workbooks have a really low usage for power BI Service. So in this video, we showed how to get data. We can get data from Excel, we can also get data from these PBI X, these are the power BI Files. So, if I just import a random one, you can see it is importing, but that’s just another way of getting data from power BI Desktop. So, instead of publishing it, instead of you go the other way, you go from power BI Service and you grab it. It also imports the report as well. As you can see there is the report previously created.

So, we had to look at how to import Excel. There were two options. One option is to import the data, so that makes it into a dataset, great thing about that is that you can then build reports for it, but you do need it to be a table, otherwise you get an error message.

And the second thing you can do much less useful is to import a local file and have it in Excel online, and you can pin range as dashboard and that’s it.

And finally, you can get data from the Cloud, from OneDrive, either the business or the personal or from SharePoint. And if it’s in OneDrive, then when the data changes in an hour or less, the data in power BI will also change to reflect any additional changes.

250. The Navigation Pane, including Add a Quick Insights result to a Report

In this video, we’re going to finish off looking at the navigation panel on the left hand side.

So, we have the home. We’ve had a look at this previously, so we have an introductory video. We have favourites and frequents, we have recently accessed, workspaces, recommended apps. We’ve seen those before in the get data and services. So, it looks very familiar. And how to learn to use power BI, a little bit of learning there. And also a guided self-paced learning, which is probably the best of those pages. It’s quite a lot of ideas here, but we’ve covered these basically in this course.

Favourites, these are things that you have clicked on to be favourites. So, if I was going into a report, and, we have over here, the mark as a favourite. So, you can see it better if I just reduce the size of the text. So, if I mark this level four report as a favourite, and go back to the favourites in the navigation page, you can now see that level four is one of the favourites.

Again, recents, this gives me my recents. Fairly similar to what we’ve got in the homepage, except the homepage is limited here. You can see there were six. If I go into the recent section, you can see we’ve got at least 10 there.

We’ve gotten various actions that can be done. These include sharing. Again, you need a power BI pro licence for that, analyse in Excel, we’ll look at that in a separate video. We’ve got various settings, and we’ll have a look at some of these settings later. And we can clone. We can duplicate it.

We’ve also got something called quick insights. If I click on this, the very first time that you use the quick insights, it has to analyse the data. But what it’s done is it’s created some instances of your Q and A section. So, these are tiles that you may or may not wish to use. It’s profitable to have a look, see if any of these could be useful. And then, any of these that are interesting, you can pin to a dashboard. So, say, I wanted to pin this to my existing, my dashboard. I can click pen and it’s pinned. So, you can see a visualisation has been pinned to my dashboard apps. We will look at how to create apps later when we have the power BI pro licence, same was shared with me. So, this gives me all of the options that we’ve seen on the home tab, and a few more.

Let’s have a look at what happens with the workspace items. So dashboards, for instance, you can open, rename, share, remove, and then there all settings. Again, we’ll have a look at the settings later. Reports, similar things, just open, rename, and remove and analyse in Excel. But it’s really this data sets that’s more interesting with the open menu. So, if I click on it, we have analysed in Excel and delete. We’ve got security. We’re going to be looking at role level security, just a few videos from now. We’ve got rename, we’ve got scheduled refresh, so trying to make sure you’ve got the latest data. Again, we’ll have a look at that later. Settings and permission. And we’ve got this, so view related. So, we have a dataset. We can delete the data set. So, if I go to the level four and click on delete, it says, that it will delete it and all reports and dashboard titles containing data from this data set will also be deleted. So, the question is what reports and dashboard tiles relate on for this dataset?

So, if I click on any data set and click on view related, you can also get quick insights, just like you can in wave reports. Then we can see that this particular one is used in a level four report, but not in any dashboards in my workspace, or in any of other workspaces. If I click on something else, say this customer profitability sample and have a look at view related, you can see it is used in two dashboards and in a report and it could well be used elsewhere. And we’ve also got this show in lineage view. Well, it takes a while to load up, but it shows why you have your data cells, your data sets, your reports, and then your dashboards, and how they are connected. So, this, my dashboard, has got information from a report and it’s got information from another report and it’s got information from a workbook in this particular case. So, this allows you to see a visual view of how everything is interrelated. And you can zoom out, zoom in, have a look at it full screen. So, exit that by pressing escape. And we can create new dashboards with Paul’s dataset, or if you go back to the list view there. So that for me is a very interesting view. It allows me to see how things are interconnected, but equally, if I want to hide, starting in one particular data set, I can go to that dataset, and I can click on any particular, any particular data set, maybe, I’ll click on that, the customer profitability. I’ll click view related. I’ll click show lineage view. Wait quite a few seconds. And it shows me the highlighted dataset and where it is reflected. It’s reflected in one report, two dashboards. These are the specific things, and here they are highlighted.

So in this video, we’ve had a look at the remainder of the navigation pane, and you’ve seen how you can get easy access to your favourites or recents, and how you can manipulate, so rename or get some insights from reports, dashboards, and data sets, how you can rename them, how you can delete them, and how you can see what happens if you delete a data set, what reports and dashboard tiles get removed.

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