In this video I will show you how easy it is to use Power BI to connect to your
data. Keep watching, let's start by taking a
look at the Power BI desktop interface. At the top is a ribbon and I love that
because I've certainly grown familiar with it over the years using it with
office so a lot of functionality is exposed very conveniently through the
ribbon and we're going to explore and dig into each of these tabs for now
just know that it's there. On the left you have three tabs and how can I look
very interesting right now three tabs or three views the first of the report view
the next one is a data view and the last one is a relationship view and on here
our visualization and fields again we're going to bring in some data and as you
go through it you will see all of these elements in action again. So really that
is the first step you do in Power BI desktop which is you get data. Now if you
look here if you click get data it lists some of the common sources but if you
click more you got access to every little thing and
the the Power BI team is constantly adding connectors to new data sources
often even if the connector is not available you can sometimes connect to
it using a genetic driver like an ODBC driver perhaps for our scenario we're
going to start off by connecting to an Access database and what I've done is I
have saved my files and sequel and slash temp so this is the database that I'm
first going to connect to and in our scenario this is representing some
system data source right so typically in any organization of business user would
connect to some system data source it could be a data warehouse sequel S.A.P
something like that. In our case we're just going to have an Access database
which stands in for that. So I'm going to hit connect,
if I go to sequel and temp that's my adventure works database I'm just going
to click open and for a lot of these connectors the first steps are going to
be different how it connects to how it authenticates to it but from that point
on often the navigation experience is the same so a lot of data sources you
connect to it will just show you the list of entities that it found in this
case it's showing me the list of tables that are found inside that Access
database. Now I can click on each one and it generates a quick preview in case
there are a lot and lots of tables in the system database perhaps that you're
connecting with, then you can use the preview to make sure you're pulling in
the right data table. In our case I'm just going to select each one of these
and for now you notice down at the bottom there are three buttons load, edit,
and cancel for now we're just going to click load and that's going to load it
in the database.
So now it's actually going to the data source and copying that data set into my
Power BI desktop file so let's go ahead and save this file first
so sequel and temp save Power BI. Now what I wanted to do was to show you what that
file looks like. So let's go to details and if you can zoom in here so notice
this was my Access database it's about 20 megabytes in size and this is my
Power BI model, now it's just about less than 4 megabytes in size. Now this is
interesting because we pulled in every single table from that Access database
and you can see that our Power BI model is noticeably smaller so that's one
advantage of having a data model that the underlying technology, so what's
it's doing is it's one of the techniques it's using for compression it's called
column or compression so instead of storing data row by row it's storing it
column by column and that gives you a very good compression ratio it also
has other optimization techniques which it uses to compress data. So right, so we
pulled in this data set and that data set is copied over and saved in this
file now if you were to connect to five different data sources each one of those
will be pulled in our file and a copy would be kept within the file, and the
only time it'll go back to that source would be when I hit refresh here or
we'll talk about how you can set up automatic refresh using the PowerBI.
com service or other capabilities right so when the Refresh is invoked either
manually or through an automated process that's when the model connects back to
the source and gets the data. So all the tables have been pulled in here and
now this looks a little more interesting now we have fuse on the side we have we
see these tables over here and if I go to the data tab this looks alive again
we have the tables and I can tab through different tables look at customer
look at products see what's going on just sample the data I have pulled in
look at the relationship view, and it does create some relationships
automatically we'll talk a lot more about relationships and tables later but
for now let's just focus on getting data. Hey! keep watching more videos and keep
learning Power BI but if you did enjoy this video I would love to hear from you
so leave a comment, like, subscribe, all the good stuff. Power on my friends.