Updated: July 15, 2020 (May 11, 2015)

Power BI Report Building Example

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI, Microsoft’s hosted business intelligence (BI) service, uses Excel to access and transform data and create charts and other visualizations that are published to Power BI sites. This example shows the current production release of Power BI and the process involved to produce and publish a manufacturing production analysis report from multiple data sources.

Excel 2013 Power Query (left) is used by an IT professional or power user to access product sales forecast data from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and product inventory data from a manufacturing system (far left). Power Query is used to combine the two data sources into a single table (based on the product number) and perform additional transformation steps, including filtering, summarizing, and formatting columns.

Excel 2013 Power View (center) is used to create tables, charts, and other visualizations, generating an Excel 2013 workbook that the author publishes to the manufacturing department’s Power BI site (right).

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