What is Power BI Desktop & The flow of work in Power BI

If you're wondering what Power BI Desktop is, you'll find it's a robust business intelligence tool developed by Microsoft. As part of the Power BI suite, it empowers users to create interactive visualizations, reports, and dashboards from various data sources. Power BI Desktop offers a user-friendly interface for data transformation and modeling, allowing you to shape and clean your data to prepare it for analysis. Additionally, you can connect to a wide range of data sources such as databases, Excel files, CSV files, SharePoint lists, cloud services, and more. You can customize visuals to suit your needs, create interactive reports and utilize a formula language called DAX to define complex calculations based on your data model.

Once you have created your report or dashboard in Power BI Desktop, you can publish it to the Power BI Service where you can share, collaborate, and schedule data refreshes. The Power BI Service also provides additional features like data alerts, natural language queries, and the ability to embed reports and dashboards in other applications. The flow of work in Power BI often begins in Power BI Desktop, where a report is created, which is then published to the Power BI service and shared, so users of Power BI Mobile apps can consume the information.

Overall, Power BI Desktop is a versatile and comprehensive tool for data analysis and visualization, enabling you to share insights with others, and discover hidden business opportunities from your data.