5.2 Explore the Power BI Service - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>Okay, so in this sub-lesson</v> we're gonna show you how to get to the Power BI Service and log into it, and also give you a brief tour on how to navigate the service. So let's first show you how to log into powerbi.com. So there's a couple, actually many different ways to get into powerbi.com. Let's focus on two here. So I have a web browser open, I can go in and type in powerbi.com hit Enter, we're gonna get brought back to the page that we have right here and then I'll show you a different way to get into it as well. And we'll do this 'cause sometimes people refer to this as many different things. Sometimes they'll call it powerbi.com, sometimes they'll call app.powerbi.com, sometimes it's called the Power BI Service, either way, I tend to refer to it as a service myself, and then the URLs are just how you actually get into the service. So I'm on powerbi.com here, which we did a moment ago. You can also type in app.powerbi.com like so, and that will take you to the same thing. You get kicked to your login screen, so let's just go ahead and use this. I've already got my account logged in here, so I'm gonna click there and then we're gonna come into the homepage of powerbi.com, or the Power BI Service. So let's just do a brief tour of the Power BI Service here. So up in the upper left-hand corner, just to show you here we've got these nine little dots right here, so if we were to go ahead and click on that here this is what is called the app launcher in Office 365. So I could go and get my other apps if I wanted to. And just as a note, here's another way to get yourself into the Power BI Service. So I've got my Power BI over here. So that is the app launcher. So the next significant area here in the Power BI Service is down the left-hand side of the screen here. So if I go like this and just highlight this area here, this is what is referred to as the navigation pane. I'm actually gonna go as far down as get data here because I just wanna show you a number of these key features here. So there's the ability to go to the homepage which we are on right now we can go in and take a look at the favorites, so we may have favored it a number of reports or dashboards. The recent items we've taken a look at. So you do have the ability to create content up here in the service, but that's beyond the scope of this class. You can go ahead and take a look at the data sets that you have available to you, you can build apps, which are once again beyond the scope of this class, you can take a look at the items that are shared with you, we can build deployment pipelines, which are beyond the scope of this class as well. But a great way to start building out more robust enterprise power BI applications because then you can run things through a dev environment, test environment, production environment, and seamlessly manage that pipeline. And then below here we have the ability to get into the workspaces which we're gonna work on here in a bit. And then just to point out down below here you can actually use this get data button at the very bottom of screen to actually come into the service and start retrieving data within it to start building reports as well. But once again, that's beyond the scope of this class. And the fun thing here is power BI is so large that even in a class that is this long there's still a lot of items that are outside of scope because there's just so many topics to talk about. So let's next go over and take a look at some other areas across the top of the screen here. So up in the upper right-hand side of the screen here you're gonna see these three little dots. Now depends how your web browser and monitor are configured here, everything right now for me is buried inside these three little dots. So if I just go ahead and go like this and get myself in here, we're gonna see a number of other settings here. So I've got the notifications pane inside of Microsoft 365, I've got some settings here so I can manage my storage account, go into the admin portal if I have access to it, manage gateways, if I have ability to do that as well, I can go ahead here and download the Power BI Desktop, download the Gateway if I wanna go ahead and get that installed myself, download the Paginated Report Builder, download Power BI for Mobile, and then do some analysis of Power BI inside of Excel. So all kinds of different things we can download here. And then of course help and support, so the ability to do that, and then the idea that you can go ahead and provide feedback on the product is located in here as well. So those are some of the key areas that we wanna talk about when just coming into the Power BI Service here, but let's actually just go ahead and let's navigate around a little bit. Let's go to the shared with me here, so let's just go over here. And if you ever wanna get yourself back to the homepage you can click on here, which will take me back to the homepage or lets us go back down to shared with me again. I can actually go up over here and click on the IterationInsights logo or whatever you have at the top of your screen if it's been skinned with your organizational colors, this will actually take us back to the homepage as well. So that's a good enough tour of the high level parts of the Power BI Service and how to actually get in. The rest of the navigation, we're gonna see through the subsequent sub-lessons when where actually do further work in the service itself.