What Does Power BI Look Like?

Ever wondered what’s actually inside Microsoft’s Power BI once you get past the login screen? You’re not alone. This powerful tool is famous for turning messy data into clean, interactive visuals, but for beginners, its interface can seem a bit intimidating. This guide will give you a clear, straightforward tour of what Power BI looks like, breaking down its main components so you can navigate it with confidence.

The Three Main Parts of Power BI

First, it's important to know that Power BI isn't just one single application. It's an ecosystem made up of three core components that work together. Understanding the role of each part is the first step to getting comfortable with the layout.

1. Power BI Desktop: Your Creative Studio

Think of Power BI Desktop as your workshop or design studio. It's a free application you download and run on your Windows computer, and it’s where all the heavy lifting happens. This is the primary environment where you will:

• Connect to hundreds of different data sources (Excel files, databases, web pages, cloud services, etc.).
• Clean and transform your data using the powerful, built-in Power Query Editor.
• Create relationships between different data tables in the "Model view."
• Design and build interactive reports by dragging and dropping elements onto a canvas.

Essentially, if you're building a report from scratch, you'll be spending most of your time in Power BI Desktop. The interface is packed with features, which we'll explore in detail below.

2. Power BI Service: The Sharing and Collaboration Hub

Once you’ve built a report in Desktop, what’s next? You need a way to share it with your team, your boss, or your clients. That’s where the Power BI Service comes in. This is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that you access through your web browser.

The Service is designed for publishing, sharing, and collaboration. Here, you can:

• Publish reports from Power BI Desktop to the cloud.
• Organize content into "Workspaces" to collaborate with colleagues.
• Create high-level dashboards that pin key visuals from multiple reports.
• Set up automatic data refreshes to keep your reports up-to-date.
• Securely share your reports and dashboards with specific people.

While you can do some light report editing in the Service, its main look and feel is geared towards consuming and managing completed reports rather than building them from the ground up.

3. Power BI Mobile: Your Insights On-the-Go

As the name suggests, Power BI Mobile gives you access to your reports and dashboards on your phone or tablet (available for iOS and Android). The look is optimized for smaller touch screens, allowing you to view and interact with your data from anywhere. You can’t build reports here, but you can drill into data points, apply filters, and get alerts - making it perfect for quick checks on business performance when you're away from your desk.

Taking a Closer Look: Inside Power BI Desktop

Since Power BI Desktop is where most of the creation happens, let's zoom in on its interface. When you open the application, you're presented with a main screen that can be broken into several key areas.

The Main Canvas

This large, central area is your canvas. It's the blank space where you’ll drag, drop, resize, and arrange your visualizations - like bar charts, line graphs, maps, and tables. In essence, it's where your data story visually comes to life page by page.

The Left-Side Views

On the far left, you'll see three small icons that let you switch between the core views of Power BI Desktop. Each view has a distinct purpose.

• Report View: This is the default view. It shows your main canvas and is where you build the visual aspects of your report.
• Data View: Clicking this icon displays your data in a raw, tabular, spreadsheet-like format. It's incredibly useful for inspecting, sorting, and understanding the actual data that’s powering your visuals. You can’t change values here, but you can see exactly what you're working with.
• Model View: This view is where you manage the relationships between your data tables. If you've connected to multiple data sources (e.g., a sales table and a customer information table), this is where you "tell" Power BI how they link together (for example, by matching a CustomerID column). It looks a bit like a flowchart, showing tables as boxes with lines connecting them.

The Right-Side Panes

The right-hand side of the screen contains the control panels you'll use constantly. These panes are the heart of report building.

• The Visualizations Pane: This is your palette of chart types. You see icons for bar charts, pie charts, maps, cards, and more. First, you pick a visual. Then, below the icons, you configure it by dragging data fields (from the Fields pane) into specific "buckets" like Axis, Legend, and Values. This pane also has a "Format" tab (represented by a paintbrush icon) for customizing colors, fonts, titles, and other aesthetics.
• The Fields Pane: This pane lists every single data source you’ve connected to, organized into tables that can be expanded to show all the available columns (or "fields"). To create a visualization, you simply find the data field you want in this list and drag it onto the canvas or into one of the buckets in the Visualizations pane.
• The Filters Pane: Want to let your users slice and dice the data? This pane is where you apply filters. You can add a filter that affects a single visual, an entire page, or the whole report. For example, you could add a "Date" filter here to allow a user to only see data from the last quarter.

At the very top, you’ll find the Ribbon, which will feel familiar to anyone who has used other Microsoft Office products. It contains tabs like Home, Insert, Modeling, and View, offering access to key actions like "Get Data," "Transform Data" (which opens the Power Query Editor), and "Publish."

Publishing and Sharing: The Power BI Service Interface

When you finish a report in Desktop and hit "Publish," it's sent to the Power BI Service. The web interface for the Service looks cleaner and simpler than Desktop because it’s designed more for viewing than creating.

Workspaces and Content

On the left-hand navigation menu of the Power BI Service browser window, you’ll see "Workspaces." Think of these as collaborative folders. "My Workspace" is your personal sandbox, while shared workspaces are used to house projects for specific teams or departments (e.g., "Marketing Team" or "Q4 Sales Report").

When you click into a workspace, you'll see its content organized into tabs for Dashboards, Reports, Datasets, and Dataflows.

The Big Difference: Reports vs. Dashboards

This is a major source of confusion for newcomers, but the visuals make it clear. A Report in the service looks nearly identical to what you built in Desktop - a multi-page, deep-dive document full of interactive visuals you can click, filter, and drill into. A Dashboard, however, is a single-page canvas showing a curated, at-a-glance view of your most important metrics. You build a dashboard by "pinning" individual visuals from one or more reports. Think of a car’s dashboard: it shows only the most critical information like your speed and fuel level, not the complex engine data running underneath.

Interaction in a dashboard is limited - clicking a pinned tile usually takes you to the underlying report it came from. In contrast, interacting with a report can change other visuals on the same page.

Putting It All Together: A Simple Example

Let's make this real. Imagine you're an e-commerce manager who wants to build a simple sales map.

1. In Power BI Desktop: You'd click "Get Data" and connect to your Shopify sales data (e.g., an Excel export).
2. Report View: In the Visualizations pane, you'd click the "Map" visual. It appears on your canvas.
3. Building the Map: From the Fields pane, you'd drag "Country" into the 'Location' bucket in the Visualizations pane. Then you'd drag "Total Sales" into the 'Bubble size' bucket. Instantly, a world map appears with bubbles over each country sized according to sales revenue.
4. Publish to Service: You'd click "Publish" in the top ribbon, select your desired workspace (e.g., "Marketing Team"), and your report is now online.
5. Creating a Dashboard in the Service: Using your web browser, you'd navigate to the report in the Marketing Team workspace. Hovering over your map visual, you’d click the "Pin" icon and create a new dashboard called "Live Sales Metrics."
6. Viewing On-the-Go: Finally, you could pull out your phone, open the Power BI Mobile app, and see your "Live Sales Metrics" dashboard with the map right there.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Power BI isn't one screen but a connected environment. You build in Power BI Desktop's feature-rich studio, share and collaborate via the web-based Power BI Service, and monitor key metrics from anywhere with Power BI Mobile. Understanding what each part looks like and what it's for is the first and most important step toward moving from simply looking at data to truly making it work for you.

That said, the deep functionality demonstrated here also reveals a steep learning curve. For marketers, founders, and sales teams who just need answers from their data without becoming BI experts, the process of configuring data models and building dashboards manually can be overwhelming. We built Graphed to solve this. Instead of spending hours in the Power BI Desktop designer, we allow you to connect all your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce in seconds and just describe the dashboard you want in plain English. Your dashboards are built for you in real-time, letting you get straight to the insights.