An Introduction to Power BI

Author: Connor Ingram

Power BI is a data analytics/visualization tool within the Power Platform. In this video I’ll show you how to connect to Dataverse and create charts and visuals based on your data. In addition, we will go over optimizing your call/query to increase performance and how to share your report and datasets with other users in your tenant.

Before we jump into the video, I’d like to define a few terms and elements of Power BI, and give you a tree-view of how they interact with each other.

Workspace

Think of this like an environment. There are two types: personal and public. You can share public environments with other users in your tenant to give them access to reports, dashboards, and datasets within that workspace.

Dashboards

Dashboards are collection of tiles and/or reports that’s built on the Power BI Service – unlike reports which are usually built using Power BI Desktop. You can add both reports, and tiles (individual charts/visuals) to a dashboard.

Dataset

A dataset is like a snapshot of data in your system – configured using Power BI Desktop. This includes filters, column selections, and any added or custom columns. The snapshot can get refreshed up to 8 times a day. You can share datasets with other users in your tenant to allow them to build other reports and dashboards, all based on the same data.

Report

A report is a collection of charts and visuals that can contain multiple pages.

Visuals/Tiles

You can think of tiles and visuals as essentially the same thing within Power BI – it just depends on the context. In the context of a dashboard or workspace, one individual chart/visual is referred to as a tile. In the context of Power BI Desktop, they’re generally referred to as visuals.