PL-300 – Section 32: Part 4 Section 1 – An Introduction to the Power BI Service

243. Welcome to Part 4: The Power BI Service

Hello, and welcome to part four of this course, and here we’ll finish off the PL-300 requirements, so let’s see what we’ve got. We will be creating dashboards, we’ll be managing files and datasets, managing workspaces, and doing a little bit on getting data from different sources, creating reports, and enhancing reports for usability and storytelling.

Now, before all of this, we need to know what the Power BI Service is. So, first of all, we’ll need to know what the Power BI Service actually is. There’s some terminology in the Power BI Service because the word dashboard has a very special meaning on the Power BI Service, and it might not be the one that you’re thinking of. So, if you can start out this terminology straight away, then that will make the rest of this part easier. There are three different versions of Power BI. We’ll start off with the free version and then go to the Power BI Pro.

Now, there is a free trial of Power BI Pro, so if you think you can get through this part for the course in 60 days or less then this part won’t cost you any money to be able to enjoy. We will then have a look at role level security after uploading reports onto the Power BI Service.

Now, roll level security, you do a bit of it in Power BI Desktop and a bit of it in Power BI Service. So, I’ve waited until this part four to do it because it didn’t make sense to do half of it and then have to wait to part four to do the other part. We’ll then look at dashboards, managing data sets, creating and managing workspaces, and finding out what workspaces are, and the difference between dashboards, apps, and workspaces.

And, then, a final few items. Things that don’t quite fit into any of the other parts of this course. Well, hope you enjoy it, and without further ado let’s have a look at the Power BI Service.

244. Introducing The Power BI Service

Hello, and welcome to part four of this course, which is all about the Power BI Service.

Now, we’re going to be looking at power BI. We’re going to be looking at the terminology that is used there, because I think once you have got a handle on what’s the difference between a datasource, dataset? What’s the difference between a root port and a workspace and an app, then all of this becomes a lot easier?

Then, we’re going to have a look, bit by bit in logical groupings, the requirements of the DA 100 exam plus some additional stuff, which is probably useful, for being able to use the Power BI Service. So, for instance, we need to know how to actually look at reports, look at datasets, look at dashboards, create apps. And if that wasn’t in these requirements, then we’ll be inserting them. However, there are a lot of requirements, that we will have a look at individual videos for, and a lot of them are in this final section deploy and maintain deliverables.

So, we’re looking at datasets. So, these are the models that we’ve been working on. We’d be looking at how to keep them up-to-date, how to have only individuals have access to the data that they need. So, we can do that by stuffing access altogether from certain datasets or trimming down various roles. So, it’s just a particular part of it. When we’re looking at big data, some of that data can be really big in big terabytes and we can’t refresh them each time. So, we’ll looking to see how we can just refresh the last few days, for instance, with incremental refresh. And we can also say this dataset is very good. Let’s certify it, for instance, or let’s otherwise promote it.

Then we’ll be looking at workspaces. Workspaces of things that can hold data sources, datasets reports together. So, we can create new workspaces. We’ll be starting off with workspace called my workspace, which is a private version, but then we’ll be getting into a wide of series of workspaces. We’ll be recommending developed, life cycle strategies, but that’s only if you got Power, BI premium.

We’ll be adding rolls to the workspaces. So, some people can access everything. Some people can read and write just reports and some can just feed them. We’ll be looking at apps. So, these are published and packaged workspaces, and we’ll be seeing how we can publish in-portal, update assets in a workspace, but that’s not all we’ll be doing in this part.

We’ll also be looking at another section, namely, the create dashboard section. So, dashboards are element from reports. Reports on what we’ve been creating in Power BI Desktop, is a better terminology, a bit interesting, as I say, we’ll look into that fairly early on. So, we’re looking how we can have more bio of user desktop, so dashboards. we’ll be managing the various extracts on the dashboard and letting me know if the data changes significantly.

We’ll be adding new features onto your dashboards using the Q and a feature new reports, new visualisations would be adding, dashboard theme, and seeing how that might conflict with your existing reports.

We’ll be pinning a live report page or dashboard and seeing how that’s different from pinning a visualisation. And we’ll be configuring the data classification. For example, is it, of a high, middle or low classification? What type of labels might be useful in your organisation?

Now, just to say that Power BI Service, does keep being updated, as Power BI Desktop does. So hopefully you won’t see too many dissimilarities between what you were able to see on screen and what you see in your own version. So, I hope you’re going to enjoy this. And the first thing we need to do is to log into the Power BI Service.

245. Logging into Power BI Service and a Quick Look Around

Now, in this video, we’re going to sign in to the Power BI Service. Now, though, at least to us doing this, there’s probably many more.

Now, one way is by going on to the internet to powerbi.microsoft.com. And then we’ve got to sign in, button at the top. And then you can sign in with your email address and so forth. However, an alternate way of doing this is by going to Power BI desktop, the same desktop that we’ve used in parts one to three of this course. And by going to your name at the top right hand corner, assuming you’re signed in.

Now, we signed in and we created our Power BI Service email address in level one of part one of this course. So, if you need to go back and have a look at it, then why not go back to a video called saving visualisation to the desktop and to the Power BI Service. That’s right back in level one.

Now, this is a lot easier if you’re already signed in because the computer already knows your username and password. So, you can just click on your name and click on view account or Power BI Service. So, we’ll click on Power BI Service and here it is coming up in a separate window. So, let’s just have a quick look around the Power BI Service. And this is not something that we have really looked at much in any parts of the course prior to this.

So, on the left hand side, we have a navigation pane that can be collapsed or shown with these three lines. Open the top here, top left. This is your Microsoft 365 app launcher. So, this says, what apps are associated with your accounts. Then we have a home button. So that takes us right back to home. We currently at home here. Over here we have for the top right, all of these little icons, we’ll have a look at what each of these do, including the search, the settings, downloading various programmes, help, and things to do with your user. Then we have our main part, our canvas. So, we have a little welcome message, a free minute introductory video that just shows that Power BI can hold all the stuff that we’ve been doing in parts one to three of this course. Your favourites and frequents. So, things that you have favorited. So, the little star icons that you’ll see that you can say, I see this is a favourite, and I want this to appear here. Those things that you have done most recently, workspaces and recommended apps plus a few videos.

Now, if I go to My workspace here on the left hand side, you can see that we’ve got dashboards, currently none of these, reports. So, these are ones we have previously done in part one to three of this course. Don’t worry if there’s nothing there and you not uploaded anything to Power BI. Once we get away from the instruction, I’ll be starting to move completely blank slate. We’ll be creating our visualisations, uploading them. And part of the reason is because some things interact with the desktop.

So, I want to be able to show that we can create the things in the desktop, upload them and have this interaction in Power BI Service. So, we’ve got reports, we’ve got workbooks and we’ve got datasets. And you might be thinking, okay, what’s the difference between a workbook and a dataset? What are workspaces? And if you click on workspaces, we have My workspace, but we can create a new workspace. Except we can’t. We need to upgrade to Power BI Pro for this. So hopefully, this is giving you a bit of an introduction to what Power BI Service is. And you can see that we can actually, use a lot of the creation tools from Power BI desktop, right here in the Power BI Service. Or be that it looks like it’s about two versions earlier than what I’m using in Power BI desktop.

Now, you can create new visualisations in Power BI Service. However, if you’re going to do anything much bigger than Microsoft do recommend that you use the desktop because there is more functionality.

Now, you can see that we got a number of words here reports, workbooks, datasets and dashboards. And you might be thinking kind of we’ve been creating all of these reports. Surely, this is a dashboard. And this is when technology starts to get really confusing in Power BI.

So, in the next video, I’m going to take these plus a few more terms and describe how they actually are used in the Power BI Service. Because, if you’re not clear what the difference between a dashboard and a report is? What the difference between a workbook and a dataset is? Then this can get very confusing, very quickly. So, I’ll see you in the next video.

• Category: Uncategorized