Hello, and welcome back. In this video, you will get to explore the world of reports and dashboards in Power BI. But first, let's understand what a Power BI report is. Did you know that visualizations are also called visuals? A Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations such as line charts, maps, and tree maps. There are three ways in which reports can be created. You can create them from scratch within Power BI, import them with dashboards that colleagues share with you, or Power BI can create them when you connect to datasets from Excel, Power BI Desktop, databases, and software as a service applications. Let's look at an example. When you connect to an Excel workbook that contains power view sheets, Power BI creates a report based on those sheets, and when you connect to a software as a service application, Power BI imports a prebuilt report. Now, let's see where you can find these reports. You'll be able to view and interact with reports using two modes, reading view and editing view. Let's explore these two ways of working with a report that you created. When you open Power BI in the browser, you'll see workspaces in the navigation pane on the left. If reports have been shared with you by colleagues, you'll see them listed here. Under this is my workspaces. In here, you can see any reports that you created and published to the Power BI service for your own use. Click on the report name, in this case, Contoso Financial Report. The report will open in reading view, showing the first page of the report. You'll notice the names of the pages in the report, in the page's area of the screen. You can view another page by simply clicking on the name, like the overall trends one listed here. If you have editing permissions on a report, you'll be able to see the edit button on the right-hand side of the command bar. Clicking on this, switches to edit mode. Clicking reading view on the left of the command bar will switch you back to viewing mode. If you hover over a visualization such as this table, you will see a pin symbol. Clicking on this pin will allow you to add this visualization from this report to a dashboard. You will get to examine a dashboard in more details shortly. On the command bar, you also have a share command to allow you to share reports with others. Remember that your ability to share will be controlled by your Power BI license. Once you share your report, anyone with an admin member or a contribution role can edit it, they have access to all the exploring, building, and sharing capabilities. When you share the report with others, they can explore and interact with the report in reading view. Next, you'll get the opportunity to learn more about dashboards and the advantages of using them. Think of a dashboard as a clean Canvas. You can pin any number of tiles and widgets to the canvas in a number of ways, but where can you find these tiles and widgets? Simple, you can get them from reports and Q&A. Each tile pinned from a report or from Q&A displays a single visualization that was created from a dataset. You also have the option to pin report pages to your dashboard, wondering why you should dash off to the nearest dashboard. The benefits of using dashboards will include, viewing all the information you need to make decisions at a glance, monitoring the most important information about your business, creating a personalized view of a larger dashboard showing all the metrics that matter most, ensuring consistency among colleagues when viewing and using the same information, and monitoring the health of your business, product, or marketing campaign. Now, let's see where you can find these dashboards. When you open an app, you are presented with a dashboard, unlike a report which may contain many pages, a dashboard is a single Canvas which holds a collection of visualizations from different sources. You can view any dashboards you have been given access to in the workspace area. Here in my workspace, you can see there are two reports, one called Contoso Financials, and one called Power BI Sample Report. There is also a sales data dashboard which can be opened by clicking on it. In this sales data dashboard, the Canvas contains four visuals, all related to sales. Two of these visuals have been pinned from the Contoso financials report, and two from the Power BI sample report. At the top of the dashboard is an area called, ask a question about your data. When you click on this, it brings you to a screen where you can interrogate the results shown on the dashboard. For example, if largest gross sale is typed here, a results card is generated showing the largest gross sales amount. You can even pin this result to the dashboard if you wish. Clicking on the exit Q&A choice at the top returns you to the full dashboard. If you have permission to edit a report, clicking on dashboard tiles from that report will open it. Keep in mind that not all tiles are pinned from reports, so you may have to click a few tiles to find a report. Here, clicking on the sales discount table opens the underlying report, the Power BI sample. To return to the dashboard, click on the dashboards heading under either the workspace or my workspace options, and click on the dashboard, you would like to see. Clicking on sales data here, reopens the dashboard. A dashboard can be viewed in webpage layout, which is what you can see here, or it can be formatted for viewing on a mobile phone. Clicking on edit in the command bar, opens a drop-down menu. Selecting mobile layout will show this dashboard as it would appear on a mobile phone. If any of the dashboard visuals are too large to be viewed clearly on a mobile phone, you have the option to unpin a tile on the right-hand side, this will unpin it in mobile view only. On the command bar on the left, clicking on mobile layout gives a choice to switch back to web layout. It all sounds quite dashing. Excellent job. There are so many more things to explore, let's power up and take a look at what's next. See you soon.
