Create a simple report in Power BI

First things first. How to install Power BI?

Installing Power BI is such a breeze. Power BI Desktop version is available for free download online. This free version supports most of the features offered by Power BI and it is more than enough to get going. Right now only the Windows version of Power BI is available.

Download Power BI

There is an option to download installation files for 32-bit or 64-bit machines based on your system specification. Double-clicking on the installer file (.msi) opens up the installation wizard and you just have to follow the prompts to get it installed. Once installed, launch Power BI to start creating amazing visualisations.

Follow the steps below to create a simple report. The data file used for this report can be downloaded from here.

Step 1: Load the data into Power BI. For this report, we are using a single .csv file with information regarding mean weekly rent in New Zealand from 1993 to 2018.

To do this, click on Get Data, choose Text/CSV from the list of options and click Connect.

This opens up a window where you can browse to the folder that contains the csv file and Open it. The data preview window pops up showing a sample of the data in the csv file along with other information like Delimiter (in this case delimiter is comma).

Power BI automatically assigns data types to each column in the file based on a sample of the data. Click Load to continue. Now the file is loaded. The file name and columns can be viewed in the right side of the window. Clicking on the Data view on the left side would show the full data contained in the csv file. This view is useful to understand the contents of the file. Here, it is possible to use filters (like in Excel), sort data in ascending or descending order, delete columns which are not needed etc.

Now that the data file is loaded, follow the video below to create a simple report using Power BI.

For practice, there are many data files and sample reports available at https://figure.nz/.