Get started building with Power BI（2）

For these software services, the Power BI service provides a collection of ready-made visuals that are pre-arranged on dashboards and reports for your organization. This collection of visuals is called an app. Apps get you up and running quickly, with data and dashboards that your organization has created for you. For example, when you use the GitHub app, Power BI connects to your GitHub account (after you provide your credentials) and then populates a predefined collection of visuals and dashboards in Power BI.

There are apps for all sorts of online services. The following image shows a page of apps that are available for different online services, in alphabetical order. This page is shown when you select the Get button in the Services box (shown in the previous image). As you can see from the following image, there are many apps to choose from.

For our purposes, we'll choose GitHub. GitHub is an application for online source control. When you select the Get it now button in the box for the GitHub app, the Connect to GitHub dialog box appears. Note that GitHub does not support Internet Explorer, so make sure you are working in another browser.

 

After you enter the information and credentials for the GitHub app, installation of the app begins.

After the data is loaded, the predefined GitHub app dashboard appears.

In addition to the app dashboard, the report that was generated (as part of the GitHub app) and used to create the dashboard is available, as is the dataset (the collection of data pulled from GitHub) that was created during data import and used to create the GitHub report.

You can select any of the visuals and interact with them. As you do so, all the other visuals on the page will respond. For example, when the AdamBJ in the treemap on the Pull Requests report the other visuals on the page adjust to reflect that selection.

Update data in the Power BI service

You can also choose to update the dataset for an app, or other data that you use in Power BI. To set update settings, select the schedule update icon for the dataset to update, and then use the menu that appears. You can also select the update icon (the circle with an arrow) next to the schedule update icon to update the dataset immediately.

The Datasets tab is selected on the Settings page that appears. In the right pane, select the arrow next to Scheduled refresh to expand that section. The Settings dialog box appears on the canvas, letting you set the update settings that meet your needs.

 That's enough for our quick look at the Power BI service. There are many more things you can do with the service, and we'll cover these later in this module and in upcoming modules. Also, remember that there are many types of data you can connect to, and all sorts of apps, with more of both coming all the time.

Summary

Let's do a quick review of what we covered in this module.

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your data into interactive insights. You can use data from single basic sources, like a Microsoft Excel workbook, or pull in data from multiple databases and cloud sources to create complex datasets and reports. Power BI can be as straightforward as you want or as enterprise-ready as your complex global business requires.

Power BI consists of three main elements—Power BI Desktop, the Power BI service, and Power BI Mobile—which work together to let you create, interact with, share, and consume your data the way you want.

We also discussed the basic building blocks in Power BI:

• Visualizations – A visual representation of data, sometimes just called visuals
• Datasets – A collection of data that Power BI uses to create visualizations
• Reports – A collection of visuals from a dataset, spanning one or more pages
• Dashboards – A single-page collection of visuals built from a report
• Tiles – A single visualization on a report or dashboard

In the Power BI service, we installed an app in just a few clicks. That app, a ready-made collection of visuals and reports, let us easily connect to a software service to populate the app and bring that data to life.

Finally, we set up a refresh schedule for our data, so that we know the data will be fresh when we go back to the Power BI service.