📊 Day 2 – Understanding Power BI Panes, Views, Components & Data Connections

📊 Day 2 – Understanding Power BI Panes, Views, Components & Data Connections

Introduction

On Day 2 of our Power BI learning series, we’ll explore the different panes, views, and components that make up Power BI Desktop. We’ll also understand the types of data connections used to bring data into Power BI for analysis and reporting.

🔹 Power BI Panes

Power BI provides several panes that help users work efficiently with data, visuals, and filters.

1. Fields Pane / Data Pane – Displays all available tables, columns, and measures.

2. Visualization Pane / Build Pane – Contains all chart types and formatting options for building visuals.

3. Filter Pane – Allows users to apply report-level, page-level, and visual-level filters.

🔹 Power BI Views

Power BI has multiple views that serve different purposes during report creation and data analysis.

1. Report View – Used to create and design reports using visuals.

2. Data View (Table View) – Displays raw data in tabular form.

3. Model View – Helps define relationships between tables.

4. DAX Query View – Used to write and test DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) queries.

🔹 Components of Power BI

Power BI consists of several components that handle different parts of the data analysis process.

1. Power Query Editor – Used for data cleaning and transformation (ETL – Extract, Transform, Load).

2. Power Pivot – Used for data modeling and establishing relationships between datasets.

3. Power View – Used for report creation and visualization.

4. DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) – Used for data cleaning, complex calculations, and measures.

5. Power BI Service – A cloud platform for publishing, sharing, and collaborating on reports.

🔹 Types of Data Connections in Power BI

Power BI allows users to connect to various data sources through different modes, depending on their data size and type.

1. Import Mode

• Used for offline connections such as Excel, CSV, PDF, and DOC files.

• Can also connect to online files.

• Supports up to 1 GB of data per dataset (in Import mode).

• Loads all data into Power BI Desktop.

• Allows data cleaning and data modeling.

2. Direct Query

• Used for live connections to online databases (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, Snowflake).

• Supports datasets larger than 1 GB.

• Does not load data into Power BI Desktop.

• Data cleaning not supported, but data modeling is possible.

3. Live Connection

• Used to connect with cloud services like AWS, Azure (ADF), and GCP.

• Supports large datasets (more than 1 GB).

• Does not load data into Power BI Desktop.

• No data cleaning and no data modeling supported.

🔹 Example: Connecting to a Data Source

To import data from Excel:
Get Data → Excel → Select File (Orders.xlsx) → Load

💡 Summary

On Day 2, we covered the core working areas of Power BI Desktop, including panes, views, and essential components. We also learned the three main connection types (Import, Direct Query, and Live Connection) and their key differences.

These concepts form the foundation for connecting, cleaning, and visualizing data effectively in Power BI.