Each Power BI Desktop view carries out specific tasks:

»» Report: You can create reports and visualizations after you’ve ingested and
modeled the data. Users spend most of their time here post-data ingestion,
transformation, and modeling.

»» Data: You can find all data ingested, or migrated, from tables, measures, and
data sources associated with reports and visualizations created here. Sources
can be local to the desktop or from a third-party data source accessible over
the web.

»» Model: Like creating a relational data model in Microsoft SQL Server, Azure
SQL Server, or even Microsoft Access, you can fully manage the relationships
among the structured tables you’ve created after you’ve ingested the neces-
sary data using Power BI.

Ingesting Data
Without data, you can’t do all that much with Power BI — data truly is the main
ingredient of your end-state recipe. Whether you’re trying to create a chart or a
dashboard or you’re posing questions with Questions and Answers (Q&A), you
must have data that comes from an underlying dataset. Each dataset comes from
a particular data source, either found on your local desktop (if you’re using Power
BI Desktop) or acquired from other online data sources. These sources may be
Microsoft-based applications, a third-party database, or even other application
data feeds. In Power BI Desktop, you either use the Power BI Ribbon (shown in
Figure 4-2) or click the Power BI Data Navigation icon (shown in Figure 4-3), to
access a data source.

Files or databases?
In Power BI, you can create or import content yourself. When it comes to the type
of content users can create or import, it boils down to either files or data stored in
a database. A word to the wise: Files can be a bit more complicated than databases.
You need to get the data, transform the data, and then import the data into a read-
able form. Suppose that you want to import an Excel or .cvs file that includes
many data types. First, you load the data into Power BI. Then you format the data
into a Power BI-ready format in conjunction with dataflows, which transforms
the data to support a data model. Finally, you query the data using the Get and
Transform feature in Power Query.

CHAPTER 4 Power BI: The Highlights 49