Power BI Beginner Level: 16 - Data View

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Short summary: The Data view in Power BI Desktop lets you view the tables which you loaded into Power BI. You can also change the data type, formatting, and some properties of columns.

Before we visualize our data on the Report view, let us take look a look at the Data view. You reach it by clicking the small table icon on the very left (1) in Power BI Desktop. The Data view is only available there, report viewers in Power BI online won't see it.

Then in the data pane on the right, you can select the table which you want to view (2) and within the table you can also select a column (3).

Note that you can use the search bar in the Data pane on the right to search for table, column, and measure names.

Whenever you click on a column name, directly or via search, Power BI will jump to that column. This is quite handy when you have a large number of columns.

Once you have a table selected, you can view the data and sort and filter columns. The sorting and filtering is just for viewing and does not affect the data import or the visuals in the Report view.

Let's go through the options in the Column tools context ribbon, which you get after selecting a column.

1. Structure: You could change the data type of the column, i.e. how the data is stored, however I highly recommend against that. Change the data type in Power Query instead.
2. Formatting: You can change the formatting (display) of a column. For example, while the data in the Product Cost column is internally saved as a decimal number (we set that in the Power Query editor), you can change the format to currency and then the number will display in charts as a currency. The format area will adapt to the data type, e.g. the options for text and date data will be different.
3. Properties: In the Summarization field, you can set the default summarization (e.g. sum, average, etc.) that you will get in your report view if you drag and drop a column into the value field of a visual. However, the default summarization (sum for numbers) is often fine and you can still change the summarization in each visual as needed, so I rarely change it here. The Data category you only need to change when you want to give your column a special meaning. The most common case is that when you have latitude and longitude columns, you should set the data category accordingly. Another common case is “Web URL”, which will format column entries as hyperlink when you display them in the Report view.
4. Sort by column: You can sort one column by another column of the same table, e.g. have month names (January, February, ..) sorted by month numbers, rather than alphabetically. This affects the ordering in visuals and is obviously quite useful.
5. Data groups: You can group values, similar to what we have done with a conditional column.
6. Manage relationships: You can manage relationships between tables, we will get to that in the intermediate article series.
7. New column: You can add new calculated columns here using DAX code, which we will get to in the intermediate article series. However you should rather add columns in Power Query (see earlier articles) whenever possible.

As a beginner, you will likely just use the Data view to have a look at your data, change the formatting of columns, or have a column sorted by another column.

In the next article, we will starting going through the different visuals which Power BI offers.

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Next article:?Visuals Overview