In Microsoft Power BI, a report is a key element of the Power BI service and desktop application. It is a collection of visualizations, tables, charts, and other data representations that provide insights into your data. Reports in Power BI are interactive and allow you to explore and analyze your data in a visually appealing and informative way. Here are some important points about Power BI reports:
- Data Source: Reports in Power BI are created using data from various sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, web services, or cloud-based sources like Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and more. You can connect to these sources and import or create data models to use in your report.
- Data Transformation: Power BI provides tools for data transformation and cleansing, allowing you to prepare your data for reporting. You can transform data, create calculated columns, and define relationships between tables to create a meaningful data model.
- Visualizations: Reports consist of visualizations that represent your data. Power BI offers a wide range of visual elements, including bar charts, line charts, pie charts, tables, maps, and more. You can customize these visualizations and add titles, labels, and tooltips to make them informative.
- Interactivity: Power BI reports are highly interactive. You can drill down into data, filter information, cross-highlight, and cross-filter to focus on specific aspects of your data. Users can click on data points or use slicers and filters to explore the data dynamically.
- Dashboards: While a report focuses on detailed data analysis, Power BI also allows you to create dashboards. Dashboards are collections of visuals and reports that provide a high-level overview of your data. You can pin specific visuals or entire report pages to a dashboard for quick access.
- Sharing and Collaboration: You can share your Power BI reports with others within your organization or externally, depending on your licensing and sharing settings. This enables collaborative data analysis and decision-making.
- Export and Distribution: Power BI reports can be exported to various formats, such as PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, and more, making it easy to distribute and present your insights to stakeholders.
- Scheduled Refresh: For reports that rely on data from external sources, you can set up scheduled data refresh to keep your reports up to date automatically.
- Customization: Power BI reports can be customized using themes, custom visuals, and custom measures to match your organization's branding and reporting requirements.
- Mobile Accessibility: Power BI reports are accessible on mobile devices through the Power BI mobile app, allowing users to access and interact with reports on smartphones and tablets.
