📊 Power BI Learning Roadmap — Part 2

Topic 3: Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is the main Windows application used to develop Power BI reports.

If Power BI Service is where reports are commonly published, shared, and managed, Power BI Desktop is where much of the report-building work happens.

Think of Power BI Desktop as your development environment for Power BI.

🖥️ What can you do in Power BI Desktop?

Power BI Desktop brings several important capabilities together.

You can use it to:

• Connect to data sources

• Clean and transform data

• Create data models

• Define relationships

• Write DAX calculations

• Create visualizations

• Design report pages

• Add filters and interactions

• Test your report before publishing it

For example, suppose you receive an Excel file containing sales transactions.

Inside Power BI Desktop, you can import the file, clean the data, create relationships between tables, calculate metrics such as revenue and profit, and build an interactive sales report.

🔹 Understanding the Main Views

Power BI Desktop primarily provides three important views.

1. Report View

This is where you build the report itself.

You add visuals such as:

• Cards

• Bar charts

• Line charts

• Tables

• Matrices

• Slicers

• Maps

You can also control:

• Formatting

• Filters

• Visual interactions

• Page navigation

• Bookmarks

• Layout

For example, you could create a Sales Overview page containing:

• Total Revenue - ₹125 Cr

• Total Orders - 2.4M

• Profit - ₹23 Cr

• Profit Margin - 18.4%

• Monthly Sales Trend

• Sales by Region | Top Products

This is the view you'll probably spend a lot of time using as a Power BI developer or analyst.

🔹 2. Table/Data View

The Data view allows you to inspect the data contained in your model.

You can look at:

• Tables

• Columns

• Values

• Data types

• Calculated columns

For example:

• Customer A | Laptop | West | ₹80,000

• Customer B | Monitor | South | ₹25,000

• Customer C | Laptop | North | ₹75,000

This view is useful when you want to understand whether your data looks correct after importing or transforming it.

However, remember:

Data view is primarily for inspecting the model, not for replacing Power Query as your data-cleaning environment.

🔹 3. Model View

Model view is where you can understand and manage the relationships between tables.

For example, imagine you have:

Sales

• SaleID

• CustomerID

• ProductID

• Date

• SalesAmount

Customers

• CustomerID

• CustomerName

• Region

Products

• ProductID

• ProductName

• Category

Date

• Date

• Month

• Quarter

• Year

Model view allows you to see how these tables are connected.

A properly designed model is extremely important because your DAX calculations and report results depend heavily on the relationships between tables.

🔹 Fields/Data Pane

The Data pane contains the tables, columns, and measures available in your model.

For example:

Sales

• SaleID

• CustomerID

• SalesAmount

• Quantity

• Date

Customers

• CustomerID

• CustomerName

• Region

Measures

• Total Sales

• Total Orders

• Profit Margin

You can drag fields into visuals to determine what the visual displays.

For example:

• Axis: Month

• Values: Total Sales

This could produce a monthly sales trend.