Walking through Power BI

Building a working dashboard in Power BI requires a series of four essential steps, namely, loading your data, transforming it, defining a data model, and creating data visuals leveraging the data model. As you can see in Figure 6.1, the four steps alternate as a cycle—your dashboard might require a few iterations before being ready for prime time:

Figure 6.1: Typical Power BI design process: load the data and transform data, define a model, build visuals, and iterate

Every step of the process relies on some specific views or dialogs in the application. By using only a handful of views, you will be able to access all the functionalities you need to build a dashboard from scratch. Figure 6.2 shows a simple "map" of where to find the most helpful Power BI views and windows so that you don't get lost along the way:

Figure 6.2: Feeling lost? This is where you find the most valuable views you will ever need in Power BI...