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Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Basic concepts for the Power BI service business user
In this articleAPPLIES TO: Power BI service for business users Power BI service for designers & developers Power BI Desktop Requires Pro or Premium licenseUse this article to familiarize yourself with some of the terms and concepts associated with the Power BI service. Understanding these terms and concepts will make it easier for you to read through the other Power BI articles and to work in the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com).
This article assumes that you've already read the Power BI overview and have identified yourself as a Power BI business user. Business users receive Power BI content, like dashboards, reports, and apps, from creator colleagues. Business users work with the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), which is the website-based version of Power BI. This article isn't about Power BI DesktopYou'll undoubtedly hear the term "Power BI Desktop" or just "Desktop." It is the stand-alone tool used by designers who build and share dashboards and reports with you. It's important to know that there are other Power BI tools out there. But, as long as you're a business user, you'll typically work with the Power BI service. This article applies only to the Power BI service. For more information about the full suite of Power BI tools, see What is Power BI?. Let's get startedTo follow along, open app.powerbi.com in your browser. There are many objects and concepts that make up the Power BI service, too many to cover in a single article. So we'll introduce you to the most common: visualizations, dashboards, reports, apps, and datasets. These are sometimes referred to as Power BI content. Content exists in workspaces. A typical Power BI workflow involves all of the building blocks: A Power BI designer (yellow in diagram below) collects data from datasets, brings it into Power BI Desktop for analysis, creates reports full of visualizations that highlight interesting facts and insights, pins visualizations from reports to dashboards, and shares the reports, and dashboards with business users like you (black in diagram below). There are many different ways that a designer can share content with you: as individual pieces of content, content bundled together in an app, or by giving you permissions to a workspace where the content is stored. (Don't worry, we'll talk about the different ways that content is shared later in this article.) At its most basic:
To be clear, if you're a new user and you've logged in to the Power BI service for the first time, you probably won't see any shared dashboards, apps, or reports yet. WorkspacesDatasetsA dataset is a collection of data that designers import or connect to and then use to build reports and dashboards. As a business user, it's possible that you'll never interact directly with datasets, but it's still helpful to learn how they fit into the bigger picture. Each dataset represents a single source of data. For example, the source could be an Excel workbook on OneDrive, an on-premises SQL Server Analysis Services tabular dataset, or a Google Analytics dataset. Power BI supports more than 150 data sources and is always adding more. When a designer shares an app with you, or gives you permissions to a workspace, you can look up which datasets are being used, but you won't be able to add or change anything in the dataset. This means that as you interact with dashboards and reports, the underlying data is safe because changes you make do not affect the database. One dataset...
To learn more about datasets, visit these articles:
On to the next building block -- visualizations. ReportsA Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations, graphics, and text. All of the visualizations in a report come from a single dataset. Designers build reports and share them with others; either individually or as part of an app. Typically, Business users interact with reports in Reading view. One report...
DashboardsA dashboard represents a customized graphical view of some subset of the underlying dataset(s). Designers build dashboards and share them with business users; either individually or as part of an app. If a business user is given permissions to the report, they can build their own dashboards too. A dashboard is a single canvas that has tiles, graphics, and text. Dashboards can look similar to a report page. Just a few of the differences are that dashboards have a natural language query field in the upper left corner, and when you select a visual tile you are transported to the underlying report or URL or query. For more explanation, see Reports versus dashboards. A tile is a rendering of a visual that a designer pins, for example, from a report to a dashboard. The majority of pinned tiles show a visualization that a designer created from a dataset and pinned to that dashboard. A tile can also contain an entire report page and can contain live streaming data or a video. There are many ways that designers add tiles to dashboards, too many to cover in this overview article. To learn more, see Dashboard tiles in Power BI. Business users can't edit dashboards. You can however add comments, view related data, set it as a favorite, subscribe, and more. What are some purposes for dashboards? Here are just a few:
ONE dashboard...
VisualizationsVisualizations (also known as visuals) display insights that Power BI discovers in the data. Visualizations make it easier to interpret the insight, because your brain can comprehend a picture quicker than it can comprehend a spreadsheet of numbers. Just some of the visualizations you'll come across in Power BI are: waterfall, ribbon, treemap, pie, funnel, card, scatter, and gauge. See the full list of visualizations included with Power BI. Custom visualsIf you receive a report with a visual you don't recognize, and you don't see it included in the full list of visualizations included with Power BI, likely it's a custom visual. Custom visuals are created by Power BI community members and submitted to Power BI for use in reports. AppsThese collections of dashboards and reports organize related content together into a single package. Power BI designers build them in workspaces and share apps with individuals, groups, entire organizations, or the public. As a business user, you can be confident that you and your colleagues are working with the same information; a single trusted version of the truth. Sometimes, the app's workspace itself is shared, and there can be many people collaborating and updating both the workspace and the app. The extent of what you can do with an app will be determined by the permissions and access you are given. Note The use of apps requires a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, or for the app workspace to be stored in Premium capacity. Learn about licenses. Apps are easy to find and install in the Power BI service and on your mobile device. After you install an app, you don't have to remember the names of a lot of different dashboards and reports. They're all together in one app, in your browser, or on your mobile device. This app has two dashboards and two reports that make up a single app. If you were to select the arrow to the right of a report name, you'd see a list of pages that make up that report. Whenever the app is updated, you automatically see the changes. Also, the designer controls the schedule for how often Power BI refreshes the data. You don't need to worry about keeping it up-to-date. You can get apps in a few different ways:
In Power BI on your mobile device, you can only install apps from a direct link, and not from AppSource. If the app designer installs the app automatically, you'll see it in your list of apps. Once you've installed the app, just select it from your Apps list and select which dashboard or report to open and explore first. Now that you've been introduced to the building blocks that make up the Power BI service for business users, continue learning using the links below. Or, start using the Power BI service with some sample data. Next steps
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