Create a report
Now that you have connected and cleaned up your data, it's time to create visuals. Visuals allow you to present data in a compelling and insightful way and help you to highlight the important components. Power BI has many compelling visuals and many more are released frequently.
In Power BI Desktop Report view, you can build visualizations and reports. The Report view has six main areas:
The ribbon at the top, which displays common tasks associated with reports and visualizations.
The canvas area in the middle, where visualizations are created and arranged.
The pages tab area at the bottom, which lets you select or add report pages.
The Filters pane, where you can filter data visualizations.
The Visualizations pane, where you can add, change, or customize visualizations, and apply drill through.
The Fields pane, which shows the available fields in your queries. You can drag these fields onto the canvas, the Filters pane, or the Visualizations pane to create or modify visualizations.
You can expand and collapse the Filters, Visualizations, and Fields panes by selecting the arrows at the tops of the panes. Collapsing the panes provides more space on the canvas to build better visualizations.
To create a simple visualization, just select any field in the fields list, or drag the field from the Fields list onto the canvas.
For example, drag the Country field from Customers onto the canvas, and see what happens.
Look at that! Power BI Desktop recognized that the Country field contained geolocation data and automatically created a map-based visualization. The visualization shows data points for the countries from your data model.
The Visualizations pane shows information about the visualization and lets you modify it.
The icons show the type of visualization created. You can change the type of a selected visualization by selecting a different icon or create a new visualization by selecting an icon with no existing visualization selected.
The Fields option in the Visualization pane lets you drag data fields to Legend and other field wells in the pane.
The Format option lets you apply formatting and other controls to visualizations.
The options available in the Fields and Format areas depend on the type of visualization and data you have.
Next, drag the Total Sales measure into the Size property of the visual.
You can make similar or other visualizations for data set fields or combine several fields into one visualization. There are all sorts of interesting reports and visualizations you can create.
You can show different visualizations on different report pages. To add a new page, select the plus (+) symbol next to the existing pages on the pages bar, or select Insert > New Page in the Home tab of the ribbon. To rename a page, double-click the page name in the pages bar, or right-click it and select Rename Page, and then type the new name. To go to a different page of the report, select the page from the pages bar.
You can add text boxes, images, and buttons to your report pages from the Insert group of the Home tab. To set formatting options for visualizations, select a visualization and then select the Format icon in the Visualizations pane. To configure page sizes, backgrounds, and other page information, select the Format icon with no visualization selected.
When you finish creating your pages and visualizations, select File > Save and save your report.
Now that you have a Power BI Desktop report, you can share it with others. There are a few ways to share your work. You can distribute the report .pbix file like any other file, you can upload the .pbix file from the Power BI service, or you can publish directly from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI service. You must have a Power BI account to be able to publish or upload reports to Power BI service.
To publish to the Power BI service from Power BI Desktop, from the Home tab of the ribbon, select Publish.
You may be prompted to sign into Power BI, or to select a destination. When the publish process is complete, you should see the following dialog.
When you select the link to open the report in Power BI, your report opens in your Power BI site under My workspace > Reports.
Another way to share your work is to load it from within the Power BI service. Open Power BI in a browser. On your Power BI Home page, select Get data on the lower left to start the process of loading your Power BI Desktop report.
On the next page, select Get from the Files section of the page.
On the next page, select Local File. Browse to and select your Power BI Desktop .pbix file, and select Open.
After the file imports, you can see it listed under My workspace > Reports in the left pane of the Power BI service.
When you select the file, the first page of the report appears. You can select different pages from the tabs at the left of the report.
To share a report or dashboard, select Share at the top of the open report or dashboard page, or select the Share icon next to the report or dashboard name in the My workspace > Reports or My workspace > Dashboards lists.
Complete the Share report or Share dashboard screen to send an email or get a link to share your report or dashboard with others.
With sharing, whether you share content inside or outside your organization, you need a Power BI Pro license. Your recipients also need Power BI Pro licenses unless the content is in a Premium capacity. There are many compelling data-related mashups and visualizations you can make with Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service.