Power BI
Power BI is Microsoft's tool for connecting data from several sources and building interactive reports and dashboards your team opens online.
Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.
Your report's card says $2.41M in sales. You click the North bar, in another chart on the page. What happens to the card?
What it's for: letting a lot of people see the same numbers without passing files around. You connect your sources (Excel, a database, SharePoint), clean them with Power Query, relate the tables and build multi-page reports or a dashboard that refreshes on its own.
How to think about it: the report's numbers are measures: formulas in a language called DAX that add up, count or divide your data.
Before you open Power BI, decide who reads it and what they decide with it: see What is a dashboard for?. And if your Total looks off, Can you average percentages?.
How it's used
A measure in DAX
In the Sales table: Branch, Date, Ticket and Amount
- marked: Total Sales = SUM(Sales[Amount])A measure: Power BI calculates it in every visual you put it in.
- North Sales = CALCULATE([Total Sales], Sales[Branch] = "North")Always North: this filter overrides any other filter on Branch.
When to look closer
A table's Total doesn't add up the rows
Average ticket = DIVIDE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), DISTINCTCOUNT(Sales[Ticket]))
- marked: Downtown: $60,000 over 300 tickets → $200
- marked: North: $10,000 over 100 tickets → $100
What does this Power BI table's Total row say?
Ask your Maestro about Power BI
It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.
You: What does "Power BI" mean, in plain words?
Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Which report do you build by hand every week that could refresh itself?
Asking about: Answers from the page "How do I build a dashboard with several charts? Build yours in Altair"
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Related terms
- Dashboard
A dashboard puts the few numbers someone checks often to make a decision on one screen, each next to its goal or its trend.
- Power Query
Power Query is the tool in Excel and Power BI for bringing in data and cleaning it with steps that get saved: dropping columns, changing types, filtering rows. When the new file arrives, you click Refresh and every step runs again on its own.
- KPI (key performance indicator)
A KPI is a number a team tracks to know whether it's doing well at what matters most, like monthly sales or orders delivered on time. It only works if it's well defined, so two people who calculate it get the same answer.
- Pivot table
A pivot table summarizes a long table in seconds: it groups by the columns you pick and sums, counts or averages another, with no formulas.