Navigate the Power BI Desktop interface

- [Instructor] Let me guess. You're watching this course because you have an interest in dashboards, have heard about Power BI, but don't even know where or how to get started. Well, keep watching and I'll guide you through the basics. You'll be a dashboard wiz in no time. The first step is to make sure that you have access to Power BI. That is the desktop application. If you are unsure on how to find it, then simply head over to powerbi.microsoft.com and select Power BI Desktop from the products dropdown list. Now, if you want to follow along with me, then pause this movie and make sure that you have the desktop app installed on your computer before continuing. What you're looking at is the Power BI Desktop welcome screen. If you've previously used Power BI Desktop, it may look a little bit different. For example, you may not have the welcome screen here. So what you need to make sure is that you click on the close button here to bring up the homepage. So essentially, once you can see this homepage, you're good to go. At the very top of the screen, we have menus and ribbons. These are essentially different features and functions that we can apply to our data. And on the left we have the key Power BI Desktop components. Let's quickly step through each one. The first one we have here is Report View. This is where we'll be designing and building our Power BI Reports. The next one is Table View. This is where we can view data once it's been imported. And the third one here is Model View. This is a more advanced aspect of Power BI to help manage multiple data sources. So I want you to be aware of this feature, but note that we won't be utilizing it for this course. The same with the fourth one here, which is the DAX Query View. You may not actually see this icon here, and don't be too hung up on it because we're not going to use it in this course. And that's it. Hopefully, by now, you are feeling a little bit more confident about getting started with Power BI Desktop.