As you already know, the tool needed to build a Power BI dashboard is Power BI Desktop
Let’s start by installing Power BI Desktop on your workstation or even server:
- Download Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft download center
- Execute “PBIDesktop_x64.msi”, click Next
- Accept the license terms and click Next
- Select the Installation Path and click Next
- Click Install
- Wait for the process to finish and close the installation wizard
You should be all set:
Start using POWER BI DESKTOP
Once you have successfully installed Power Bi Desktop, you can start using the PBIMASTER dashboard templates by first downloading the templates from your account. Edit the connection by adding your SCCM server and SQL database server name.
Build you own dashboards
Once you launch Power BI Desktop, at the top of the page is a ribbon of various tabs. The Home (1) tab provides various common functions. You can get new data (2), edit your current data (3), add new pages (4), visuals, or objects (5), create new measures and columns (6), or publish your report to Power BI on the internet. (7)
The View tab allows you to change from Desktop View to Phone View (1) or make other adjustments to the view settings. (2)
The Modeling tab allows you to manipulate the data you’ve imported to Power BI.
The Help tab offers links to a variety of Power BI help and training materials.
Below the ribbon, we can see three icons on the left side of the screen.
These icons are used to switch between the three options for viewing our data in Power BI Desktop. The default view is Report View, and the white space is called the Canvas. This is where we’ll build the visualizations that make up our Power BI reports.
At the bottom of the report are the page controls. Here, we can add new Pages, delete existing ones, or rename pages by double-clicking on the title.
On the right, you have Filters and Visualizations options. We’ll come back to this later on this post.
CONNECT POWER BI TO YOUR SQL SERVER
Now that you’re comfortable with the UI, we can link your MECM (SCCM) SQL server which is the first step to start building dashboards.
- In the Home tab, click Get Data and select SQL Server
- In the SQL Server database window, enter your Server and Database name and click Ok. Wait for the connection to complete.
You are now connected to the SQL database and ready to play with with it.