Power BI – Introducing the Fundamental Building Blocks - Datasets

The three main building blocks of Power BI are: dashboards, reports, and datasets. You can't have dashboards or reports without data (empty dashboards and empty reports aren't useful until they have data), so let's start with datasets.

Datasets

A dataset is a collection of data that you import or connect to. Power BI lets you connect to and import all sorts of datasets and bring all of it together in one place.

In the navigation bar, the datasets you've connected to or imported are listed under the ‘Datasets; heading.

Each listed dataset represents a single source of data, for example, an Excel workbook on OneDrive, or an on-premises SSAS tabular dataset, or a Salesforce dataset. There are many different data sources supported, and new ones are added all the time.

A dataset can be used over and over in many different reports. Visualizations from that dataset can display on many different dashboards.

To connect to or import a dataset, select ‘Get Data’ (at the bottom of the navigation bar) or select the plus icon next to the Datasets heading. Follow the instructions to connect to or import the specific source and add the dataset to your workspace. New datasets are listed in the left navigation bar and marked with a yellow asterisk.

Note: Any work you do in Power BI does not change the underlying dataset.

If you're part of an app workspace, datasets added by one workspace member are available to the other workspace members.

Datasets can be refreshed, renamed, explored, used to create reports, and removed. To explore a dataset, just select it. What you're actually doing is opening the dataset in the report editor where you can really start digging into the data and creating visualizations.