Overview
Once you've initially loaded and transformed your data, now you're ready to create data visualizations. As you create data visualizations you are likely to go back and forth from transforming data and modeling it.
Navigation
You will begin to create data visualization in the Power BI Desktop app.
- At the top of the screen, you'll have a variety of functions in the ribbon
- To the left is where you can toggle between your visualizations, the data and relationship model
- To the right is what you'll use to build your visualizations; Filters, visuals and data
- At the bottom are tabs, this is what you can use to display different tabs of information
- In the middle is all the real estate you have to create your data visualizations
Navigation Ribbon
There are a lot of functions available, below will highlight some of the most common:
- Home
- Clipboard: Basic Cut, Copy, Paste and Format painter functionality
- Data: Get Data will likely be the most common function used to load new data sources
- Queries: You will often navigate to 'Transform Data' and 'Refresh' to transform and update your data from the sources
- Insert: Most commonly used here may be a text box to add rich text for instructions or links to other things without creating a visual
- Calculations: New measure and Quick measure will often be used to create columns of data based on DAX code. More instructions on this further down.
- Share: Publish is how you will take your desktop version and publish it to a web link for end users to view without needing to access or edit your original PBIX file
- Copilot is not currently accessible directly from Power BI app but you can navigate to your browser to use it for ideas and troubleshooting
- Insert
- Insert new page and visuals along with advanced AI and editing tools. Most of these are not often used. Though buttons, text box and shapes could be helpful to your visualization.
- Modeling
- Another way to access to manage relationships and calculations. There are additional advanced features available here to create new parameters, manage roles and view as a certain role.
- View
- Leverage visual themes, edit mobile layout, add grid lines, snap to grid, lock objects, add filters and book marks. Again, not as commonly used as the other functions.
- Optimize
- Advanced features to optimize your visuals
- Help
- Lots of help resources: guided learning, training videos, documentation, etc.
How to Build Visualizations
- The first step is to select from the 'Visualizations' pane on the right, what visual you want to begin with. Often times, a simple table, matrix, or bar graph is a good place to start. Once you select your visual, it will appear in the canvas area. You can drag to resize or move anywhere on the page. You can also add multiple visuals to the same page.
- Next is to add your data from the Data pane on the right. Select the table that you want to pull data from and expand it. From there you can drag/drop the fields to the different sections within the Visualizations pane, as below.
Table: For a table, it's pretty straight forward, the fields listed in the order here will appear in that order in the visual
Matrix: For a Matrix, you have more flexibility to selecting what appears at the row, and column level as well as values you want to display which could be the first, last, count distinct or count. 
Some additional tips:
- For each data point you add to a visual, you can drop down the carat for additional options like renaming, moving, grouping, etc.
- For dates, you will likely want to expand the carat to select the date, not the date hierarchy
- For values, you can add conditional formatting to color code the cells based on certain data values.
Below is a sample of a matrix, when you hover over or click on a visual, in the top right you'll notice additional options.
- The arrows will give you the ability to expand data further down.
- Filters will display how the visual is filtered
- The box with arrow is focus mode that will then show you the details in table format
- In the ellipsis you can export data, show as a table remove or put into focus mode with the spotlight
Once you have all the data in the table that you want to include, you can then navigate to the format pane of the visualizations section to format the visual. There are a lot of options here to format the theme, font, headers, etc. This list of options changes depending upon the type of visual you are using.
How to add Filters
As you are selecting data to add to a visual, you will notice those same fields will appear in the 'Filters' pane. The filters pane gives you the flexibility to set certain filters for each visual. For example, you may want one visual that shows projects in progress and and different that shows projects completed. These filters will help you filter out the data that you want included in the visual.
You can update filters for each individual visual, apply it to the entire page, or apply it to all pages.
Calculations - New Measures
Measures are a great way to take original data and add new columns of data based using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) which is essentially query writing of data. This helpful for calculations, data look up, just about any Excel formula you can think of plus more but it does not mimic Excel entirely. For example, in Excel there is a VLOOKUP functionality, that is called LOOKUPVALUE in Power BI. While this is a bit more advanced, it's one of those things that as you come up against use cases, you'll discover new ways to leverage measures to accomplish what you need to. Copilot is an extremely helpful tool in the development and troubleshooting of DAX.
Power BI DAX Tutorial for Beginners | DataCamp
Top 21 Common DAX Functions in Power BI: Ultimate guide - AnalyticsLearn
Publishing your Power BI
It is highly recommended to publish Power Bi projects to the web for end users. The web version is much more user friendly for end users. It prevents end users from modifying the desktop version of the report. It enables the developer to hide a lot of items from the web version; tabs you're still working on, filters you don't need end users to see, etc.
- To publish a web version of the Power BI, from your Power BI, Home tab, select 'Publish'
- Select 'HCOM - Data Reporting'
- This will then give you a link to the dashboard
- EVERY TIME you make a change, you will want to re-publish to the same location and replace the existing version
- I would also recommend copy/pasting a link to the web version in your folder as a resource
- You can do this by going to the OneDrive Data reporting group, find the folder you want to save the link to. Select 'New' at the top and then 'Link', paste the link to the published PBI version there
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