Hi All,

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂 Today with Power BI Desktop 🙂

Background Details : In last article “Power Platform – Power BI for Beginners – Introduction to Power BI. Business value and Features of Power BI” we got familiar with Power BI. Basic introduction, understanding parts of Power BI. One of the part is Power BI desktop. In last article we discussed bit Power BI desktop as well.

I would recommend if you still didn’t read first article then please go through it. It will require hardly couple of minutes to read.

In this article we will dig more into Power BI desktop. We will explore bit more. We will do some exercise as well. Lets begin the FUN 🙂

Download Power BI Desktop – First step will be downloading Power BI desktop. We can download from here . Click on red button “Download” from the page, it will ask to choose the download as

Select the appropriate option and click on “Next” button. Once we click on “Next” button, Power BI Desktop executable will get started downloading.

Installing Power BI Desktop – Once we have Power BI Desktop executable get downloaded, double click and start the installation process. Installation is very simple just few clicks and ready to go.

Once Power BI Desktop is installed successfully we will have Power BI Desktop will be launched and first time it will look like as

As we see in Fig2, first time Power BI Desktop get launched, we have various options as to

• Get Data
• Connect to data source
• Signing option
• Documentation / Tutorial links

I’ll sign with my Knowledge Junction account which free account created under Office 365 developer program.

Demo / Connect to Data: So now we are ready to explore more, lets dig into more details. Lets connect to data and have some fun 🙂

Use Case: Simple but real life use case 🙂 In my organization, my M365 administrator interested to know from which Templates users are more creating the Sites / Teams

Options: As a Developer / Architect we have couple of options here like

• Creating console application using CSOM (Client Side Object Model)
• PowerShell script
• Go through all the sites, get their Template and maintain the count.
• Write the details in CSV file and prepare the report.

But then inst so this is bit boring 🙂 I thought why not to have nice visual and then Power BI comes into the picture 🙂

Following are the steps to create a chart which represents respective Templates and count of sites created from those:

• Launch the Power BI desktop
• Get the data. Here data will be the all the sites from my Tenant.
• We will easily export CSV file from all SharePoint Admin Center as

• Once we have data available, we are ready to create the Report / Visualization
• Through Power BI desktop we will connect to our downloaded CSV file and Load the data as (Here Data Source = Our downloaded Active Sites CSV file)

• Once we connect to data source, we will load the data as

• Once data loaded we are ready to use and perform various operations.
• Here in our case we need to prepare a chart which will demonstrate the Templates and count of the site created using respective templates.
• Navigate to the “Report” tab as

• From Visualizations pane select “Stacked column chart” as

• For “Stacked column chart” we need to select the “Axis” (Column / Field) which we need to use to represent chart, “Legend” and “Values” as

• Here, we are using “Template” field as “Axis” since we need to represent number of sites created using each template. So for “Value” we have selected “Count of Template” and result will be as

• We can show the chart in percentage as well, only we need to change the option for value to “Show value as – Percent of grand total” as

• And chart will look like as

In this way with these simple steps with Power BI desktop we could huge number of options available to generate reports (from simple to complex), data insights, visualizations and so on.

References:

• Power Platform – Power BI for Beginners – Introduction to Power BI. Business value and Features of Power BI
• What is Power BI Desktop
• Connect to data

Thanks for reading 🙂 Enjoy the life journey 🙂 Stay tuned to have a fun with Power Portal 🙂