Most people first open Microsoft Power BI for the same reason: they need more than what spreadsheets can offer. 

Perhaps you’re dealing with sales reports that take hours to update every week, or your marketing data is scattered across five different platforms. Perhaps you’re in an organisation or industry that needs to be able to rely on accurate, real-time data or it could be that someone has asked you for some ‘quick insights’ on an Excel file with 20 tabs that looks like it’s been around since the dawn of the company…

This is where Power BI comes in. In this blog, we explore what you can do with Power BI, best practice, how to create your first workflow and common mistakes.

What is Power BI? 

Power BI is Microsoft’s business analytics tool. Instead of manually inputting numbers into charts each week, Power BI lets you build reports from data sets that will refresh themselves. Once connected, your dashboards can pull updated information automatically and present trends in real time. 

Power BI is most commonly used for tasks such as: 

  • Sales tracking 
  • Financial reporting 
  • Marketing performance 
  • Inventory management 
  • Operational dashboards 
  • Executive KPIs 

Power BI is especially popular in organisations that are already using Microsoft 365 as it comes ready to use and integrates well with tools such as Excel, Azure, SharePoint and Teams. 

We work with East Berkshire Primary Care (EBPC), a not-for-profit social enterprise that delivers NHS Urgent and Primary Care services. Whilst we also provide them with managed IT services, EBPC came to us asking for support on how they could improve the management and reporting of their data. Using Power BI, we’ve built the infrastructure and data layer inside of their Azure tenant to enable their BI teams to report and measure real-time data.

Read the full case study here

The main components of Power BI 

One thing that confuses beginners is that Power BI isn’t just one application, but rather three core areas. 

Power BI Desktop

This is where most of the actual work happens. It’s the free application that you install on your computer to import data, clean it and build reports. If you’re learning Power BI for the first time, this is your starting point. 

Power BI Service

Once your report is finished, you can publish it to the cloud-based Power BI Service – the sharing layer. From here, teams can access dashboards through a browser, reports can refresh automatically and users can interact with visuals without needing the desktop app installed. 

Power BI Mobile

The mobile app exists mostly for consuming reports on the go, handy for checking reports from phones for remote, mobile or frontline workers. 

Creating your first Power BI workflow 

Almost every Power BI project will follow the same pattern: import your data, clean it, connect it, visualise it and share the results. 

1. Import your data 

The first thing you’ll do in Power BI Desktop is click ‘Get Data’. From here, you can connect all kinds of sources: Excel files, CSVs, SQL databased, web APIs, cloud platforms and more. For beginners, Excel will be a good place to start as it will feel familiar, and this will be the example we use from this point on in the instructions. 

Once you select your file, Power BI previews the data before importing it, giving you the opportunity to notice whether the spreadsheet you’ve got is beautifully organised or held together entirely by optimism.

2. Cleanse the data 

Here’s where we face an important realisation about analytics: most data is messy. Dates can be inconsistent, columns mislabelled, blank rows appear, and cells get merged. Fortunately, Power BI includes a tool called Power Query that makes cleaning data much easier. 

You can fix formatting issues, rename headers and standardise values easily. More importantly, it also remembers every transformation step you make, meaning when next month’s data comes in, you won’t have to repeat the clean-up process manually. 

 3. Understand relationships 

Things can get more interesting when you start working with multiple tables. Imagine you have one table containing customer information and another containing sales transactions. Individually those tables aren’t very useful, but magic happens when you connect them through a shared field, like Customer ID. This is called creating relationships. 

Good relationships allow Power BI to analyse data across multiple sources, and learning the basics of this early will allow you to get the most out of your Power BI reporting. 

4. Build visuals 

The part most people look forward to! Power BI includes drag-and-drop visualisations like bar charts, line graphs, maps, KPI cards, tables, dashboards and more. Simply select a visual, drag fields into it and Power BI generates the chart automatically. 

Try not to keep things simple: a good dashboard will be clear, focused and, most importantly, easy to read. If someone needs a tutorial on how to understand your report, consider simplifying it. 

 5. Learn basic Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) 

Data Analysis Expressions – or DAX – is Power BI’s formula language. If you’re a user of Excel and data formulation there, this will feel familiar. 

A simple DAX input might look like this: Total sales =SUM(Sales[Revenue]) 

The formula creates a reusable calculation that can be used across various visuals and reports. You don’t need to be an expert immediately, but learning the fundamentals will help turn your Power BI from a chart-building tool into a true analytics platform. 

Common mistakes that slow people down 

One of the most common beginner mistakes is importing far more data than is necessary. People often load entire spreadsheet sets ‘just in case’ they need something later but, in reality, the unnecessary data sets make reports harder to maintain. 

Another issue is ignoring data types, such as dates stored as text or currencies imported as generic number formats. This could quietly break calculations and might not be obvious to fix. 

Finally, many beginners avoid DAX for too long because learning formulas sounds intimidating. You don’t need advanced calculations immediately, but learning basic DAX makes Power BI much more useful. 

Get started with Power BI today 

Power BI feels intimidating at first because business intelligence tools tend to look more complicated than they really are, but once you understand the core flow of work, it becomes much easier to navigate. 

The key is to start small: build one report, improve it, then build another. Remember that you don’t need a massive enterprise setup to create something valuable. Most great dashboards begin with someone just trying to make sense of the numbers on a messy spreadsheet. 

Not sure where to start? Or got a complex project that you’d like a second opinion on? Our team of experts are here to help. Get in touch today.