In many organisations, Power BI reports or data sets are created centrally. For reports, this means the organisation aims to create them with a standard setup.
Power BI is a ‘Self-Service BI’ platform, a solution that was developed to give any average user the means to build their own reports and gain insight into specific analyses or questions. Of course, Power BI offers a ‘light’ version of BI, because not everyone is knowledgeable about BI or has experience with it.
One of the things you can do with Power BI is create reports based on existing data sets. Data sets are the foundation of a report: they contain one or several data sources that have been prepared for use in a data set where needed, as well as the necessary calculations for the analyses performed on these data.
Do you want to give it a go? Go to https://app.powerbi.com, click Create in the menu to the left and choose an available data set to create a report. This gives you the possibility to choose a data set and start working with it.
After you’ve selected a data set, you’ll see a canvas to which you can add visuals, which you can configure based on the data elements in your data set.
As a user, you can quickly create your own set of charts and tables, even if you’re not a BI expert. That’s a huge advantage of Self-Service BI –
but unfortunately, it has some limitations as well. If you want to combine several data sources or execute extra calculations, this method isn’t viable and you’ll need to use Power BI Desktop instead. There, you can follow the steps to connect to data, build a model and set up calculations.
Would you like to create your own reports?
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