3.1 Navigate the Power BI Desktop - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->[Instructor} In this sublesson</v> we're going to show you how to navigate the Power BI desktop by showing you some of the key areas on the desktop itself. We'll also go in and check out the Power BI desktop version. So let's go ahead and open up the file that was supplied for this sublesson in the GitHub repository. Okay. So I've got my SalesDataMart file right here and it's for sublesson one. So let's just go ahead and get that open and wait for the desktop itself to open. Okay. So let's explore some of the key areas of the Power BI desktop. Now, in the previous lesson we'd explored the Power Query Editor but this time we're going to focus in on the desktop itself. So across the top of the desktop here is the Ribbon. So no different than the Power Query Editor. There's a ribbon here that has a series of Tabs. Those Tabs have Groups, and then those Groups have Commands that we're going to go ahead and execute. So the next area that we want to show you is down the left hand side of the screen here. And this is what is referred to as the Navigation pane. So within the Navigation pane, there are three key views which we're going to focus in on. So the Report View, which is right here. So that's the very first one. The second one here is the Data View. And the third is the Model View. So these are the three views that we're going to go back and forth in, in the actual Power BI desktop itself. So we are going to spend considerable time in the Report View in lesson number four. And what we'll do here in lesson number three is we're going to focus more time and attention on the Data View, which is a grid like view that shows us our data. And we're going to then spend a little bit more time in the Model View right here which shows us the data all laid out in a diagrammatic form. Okay. So let's dive into some of the things here in the actual Model View itself. Now I am, we'll dive into the the desktop version here momentarily, but I right now I'm using the March 2021 release of the Power BI desktop. And what I'm going to do here now in this Model View is I'm going to upgrade to the new model view for an the improved design experience that I, the Power BI is delivering here. So I'm just going to click on this upgrade now and encourage you to do the same thing. Because I'm going to go through the rest of my lessons with this upgraded view. And we can see here that we have all of the tables that we loaded from power query here shown in diagrammatic fashion. So just some of the key things that we want to want to talk to you about is, if I just click on the Product table the way mine is arranged and your rearrangement may be a little different than mine but over here on the right-hand side are what are referred to as Panes. So I've got a Properties Pane and a Fields Pane. So we'll use that term pane quite a bit. So over on the left, where the Navigation pane and Properties, and you can see these little arrows here. This allows me to open and close a pane as I see fit. So if we want some more real state for doing some things, I can do that, and I can also open and close the Fields Pane. Within the individual panes, there are arrows that point up here and these are referred to as Cards. So in the Properties Pane here of the Model View I've got a General Properties card which I can use to configure general properties. And I've got an Advanced one as well. So all of these can be open and closed at your leisure. And it's really up to you to decide how you want to navigate through the various panes and cards that will make your life a little bit easier. And we're going to spend considerable time here in the Model View as we move through this lesson. And also just going over here into the Data View we can also see that there is a Fields Pane on the far right-hand side and once again, we can go ahead and collapse it. Okay. So the last thing that we want to cover here is going in and taking a look at the Power BI desktop version. So the way that we can do that is we can click on the File menu. And if we go down to the bottom here where it says About, we can click on about and in this dialog box here it's going to state what version we're dealing with here. So I can see right here, I've got the March 2021 version actually really just downloaded it not too long ago here, so this one is hot off the presses. And in fact, you may have even noticed in lesson number two a couple differences, very minor things. They don't affect how you're going to go through things here, but one of them here is now in the March 2021 release, the Dataverse shows up here in the Data group. And back in lesson two, you want to seen this and that's just how quickly the tools actually moving here is even in the middle of recording. I ended up with a different version, a newer version of the Power BI desktop. And I managed to take advantage of that. Now, as I mentioned, that's not going to impact you or any of the work you've done back in lesson number two but this is what we're using right now. And going forward we use the March 2021 release for the remainder of these lessons.