 back to another video. So I've talked about doing this in the past and I thought now's probably a good time to introduce it and that's doing a series on Power BI. So I know Power BI is obviously slightly stepping away from Excel that we've been primarily focused on in the past but I felt it was really useful to sort of drop this series in because Power BI gives us some extra sort of abilities than we have in Excel. So Power BI is a tool from Microsoft, now it says desktop application but it also allows you to create some really powerful dashboards that are both interactive and you can also have the ability, down with obviously having the actual accounts to do this, you can actually host your reports online so that users can actually access that and self-serve as required. So obviously limits we have with Excel is obviously everything's contained within one file and if you want people to be utilizing that file they can potentially disrupt or mess up the data within that file. Power BI allows them a report that they can obviously go through, they can filter, they can select different parts on the graphs and you can see on the screen here that we've got some examples in front of us so you can see this is just on the Power BI website. So you can see there's some really colorful and interactive charts they've got on there and you can see it's kind of dynamic to go through to give you a bit of a demonstration really. So you may have access to this if you're working for a company or a larger organization or if you're just working at your own home computer then obviously you can just download this via the means I'm having to show and but yeah Power BI is a really powerful tool I use it myself to really sort of visualize data that we're putting together in Excel so I felt it was very beneficial just to share with you all via this series. So in order to get Power BI, so as I said if you work for an organization and you have a company laptop or a company computer then obviously you might not be able to download via this means you might have to go to your IT department or you might actually already have access to it and therefore you're coming to this channel to try and find out how to work better with Power BI. So just ignore the first couple of minutes and we'll be jumping straight into it. So you can see we've just gone to this web address here but I'll share a link in the description to this video. All you need to do is go onto this website click download free so it's completely free download and what will happen is you'll likely get a pop-up like this so I'm using a Windows computer and it'll open up the window or the Microsoft Store simply you have a button here what just says to download once the product is downloaded you have like this bar what comes across the screen here all you need to do is click launch at that point you'll have the desktop application installed on your computer and it'll open up and look something like this. So this is the bare bones of Power BI and then once you've got this like say it should look quite familiar to you in terms of many other Microsoft applications so you've got the toolbar along the top here and obviously within each of those tabs you can see we've got various options available to us. Again if you're using like Power BI Pro or other versions that are sort of more for corporations you will notice slightly some different options you've got available here such as and I can't know what their names are but allowing you to host and publish reports you might have some more detailed tabs at the top here even though I can see the publish button here but like I say we're using just the desktop the free personal version to get you started but all the content that we look at so any functions filtering of data is something that's available regardless of what version you're using. So now that you've got Power BI installed on your desktop the first thing we want to do is actually get some data in there so in order to do so we'll be working with Excel all you do is click on this Excel button here or you can select from these buttons obviously in the background available and all we need to do is go into wherever you want to get data from so on my desktop I have created a what I thought I had always working on it's going a bit slow so on my desktop I'll just create a basic folder and in there I'll store a sales some example sales data so again what I'll do is I'll make sure there's a link in the description to this video so that you can go and get that sales data yourself and they before you can sort of replicate this at home as well. So I was going to go into my Power BI folder but obviously you can go to where everyone's relevant for you and you see all this company sales data here I just open that up you'll then get this pop-up and it will show you each of the tabs available in that workbook and we've got three here but that's actually in next video we're going to be putting it multiple bits of data together for over this first part we'll just double really simple and just pull out the employees table so when I select that tab you can see I've got all of the data what's available to me in there you can see we've got the date all the data was available to us here for some reason you can see that it's actually not picked up the column headings it's only picked up column one and column two and then it thinks that the column headings are the first row of data don't worry about that too much at the moment all you need to do is just go load and you can see it's just going through and loading that data and then what will happen once that's loaded on is okay you can now see that we've got a table on the left hand side here so this is what will happen you have as you pull more data into your Power BI application you'll have multiple table drop-downs available down this side here and this is where we can select the fields or information that we want to display on our dashboard that you see here what I'm going to do and sort of covers off a second tip you can say in one video is because we've got this issue where it's not picking up column headings what we're going to do is go into the home tab and we'll go into there's a transform data and they transform data and we'll open up another window what is just currently on my second screen as I'm putting over here so you can see at the moment obviously it's not picking up the correct column headers all we need to do that is you see there's a button on the side here use first row as headers simply just select that and you can see it's made that change for us so that's now been stored do close and apply and once it's refreshed lots of refreshing going on here you can see that our employee ID and name is now available so they are the only two fields in that particular employee sheet and again what you can do is when you're reading or naming your sheets within Excel if you just call them something applicable and so then it'll give them a recognizable sheet slash table name obviously it just makes it a lot easier so the first thing we'll do is a very basic table and what we'll do here is you can see this option here if you hover over obviously shows you what one is so if you go over you can see what some charts that column chart higher charts again we'll be going over these in another video but all we want here is this table one so click table and you can see it gives us this table option available to us here and the table is very straightforward all we need to do is just now pull into here all of the values that we want you can do this by either clicking select in the tick box or my personal preference or this way I do it is literally just click and drag each files got employee ID and name pull them into the values and you can see that they are now displayed for us in this in our table here once you've got it in there as you'll see you click on the table and you've got these arrows or the grab points around so you've got one for each corner side all you can do is click and drag and then you can obviously make your table as big or put it wherever you wish desired on your dashboard screen so not to keep this video or make these two videos too long that is the first part of this series so hopefully you're able to obviously download the application and you've got a quick insight on how to get your first piece of albeit simple data onto the dashboard in the next videos we'll be going on how to actually pull multiple pieces of data in and have them join so you can obviously filter the data based on various different data sets all together and yeah so we'll be going over that in our next videos and working with how we can put that data into charts if you did enjoy this video it would be greatly appreciated by me if you would give it a like and if you have any questions at all drop them drop me a comment below this video and I will get back to you as soon as possible so thank you very much and we'll see you in the next video