Get started with Power BI Preview


← Getting Started          
Microsoft Power BI helps you stay up to date with the information that matters to you.  With Power BI, dashboards help you keep a finger on the pulse of your business.  Your dashboards display tiles that you can click to explore further with reports.  Connect to multiple datasets to bring all of the relevant data together in one place.

Need help understanding the building blocks that make up Power BI Preview?  See Power BI Preview - Basic Concepts. 

Note: This article is about the new Power BI Preview experience, and not about Power BI for Office 365. Read more about which Power BI experience is right for me.
Prefer to watch instead of read?  Watch our getting started video:


Step 1: Get data

Sign in to Power BI. Don't have an account? You can try out the new Power BI Preview for free.

If you have important data in an Excel spreadsheet on your computer, you can create a Power BI dashboard to stay informed anywhere and share with others.  Are you a Salesforce user?  Get a head start by connecting to Salesforce to automatically create a dashboard from that data.

  1. Select Files. 

    Want to continue this tutorial with sample data? Download this sample Excel spreadsheet.

  2. Select Local File, browse to the file on your computer, and choose Open.

  3. Power BI uploads the Excel file and displays the new dashboard. In the left navigation pane, the new dashboard is listed under the Dashboards heading and the new dataset appears under the Datasets heading.  The yellow asterisk indicates the dataset is new. 
     

Step 2: Explore your dataset


Now that you have connected to data, explore to find insights.  When you've found something you want to monitor, you can create a dashboard to keep up-to-date with changes.
  1. Click the dataset image on the dashboard to explore the data you just connected to.

  2. Click Got it to close the tip about creating your first chart.
  3. In the Fields list on the right side of the page, select fields to build a visualization.  Click the checkbox beside Gross Sales and then Date.

  4. Click the change visualization type button  to switch to a different way of displaying your data. Try changing to a line chart by clicking the line chart option.

  5. When you have a visualization you want on your dashboard, select the visualization and click the Pin button.  When you pin a visualization, it will be stored on your dashboard so you can track the latest value at a glance.

  6. Because this is a new report, you need to save it before you can pin a visualization from it to the dashboard, as a tile. 

  7. Give your report a name and click Save. Power BI pins the visualization at the same time.
  8. Click the Power BI button  in the top-left corner of your browser window to go back to your dashboard. 
  9. Back on your dashboard, you can see your new visualization. Make your dashboard look even better by renaming, resizing, and repositioning tiles.

    You can click the new tile on your dashboard to go back to the report anytime.
  10. For a quick exploration of your data, try asking a question in the Q&A box.  For example, try typing "what segment had the most revenue".
    
  11. Click the pin icon  to show this visualization on your dashboard too.
  12. Click the back arrow  to go back to your dashboard.
In a few minutes, you've created an interactive dashboard.

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