How to Create a Power BI Report (Step-by-Step & Examples)

Microsoft has a good definition of what Power BI reports are:

“…a multi-perspective view into a dataset, with visuals that represent different findings and insights from that dataset.”

Simply, Power BI reports are visuals that explain your dataset better. A report could just be a single visual or pages of visuals.

These reports came from a dataset. The visuals could then be pinned on dashboards.

Here’s a graph that explains the relationship of reports with dashboards and datasets:

Before you can create any reports in Power BI, you need a dataset and a blank report canvas.

For this exercise, we’ll be using the “Retail Analysis Sample” prepared by Microsoft and Obvience.

If you don’t know how to get sample data, check out this tutorial: How to Use the Included Sample Data in Power BI (+Examples).

Once you have your dataset, go to the “Datasets” section in your workspace and click the ‘Create report’ icon.

In our example, the available dataset is the “Retail Analysis Sample”:

The steps you took from the previous section will bring you to the reports builder:

There are three primary sections you have to know:

• Canvas
• Fields pane
• Visualizations pane

Obviously, the canvas is the empty white space at the center where the visuals will be made.

The fields pane contains the different fields of your dataset (think of it as the columns of your dataset).

The visualizations pane is where you can edit and modify your visualizations like the type of visualization, the format, and specific options for the values of your visual.

If you have tried creating charts and graphs for your data in Excel, then creating reports in Power BI is even easier.

The retail analysis sample is composed of data about retail sales of items sold across multiple stores and districts. There’s also data about this year’s performance, last year’s sales, units, gross margin, variance, and others.

Now, you want to know and make a report about the total sales this year per item category.

Now, there are 2 ways to achieve that. You can either:

• Select the fields first then visualizations after
• Or if you have the specific visualization in mind, select the type of visual first then the fields after

We’ll go with the first method.

To start, focus your attention on the fields pane.

Select “Sales” and then “Total Units This Year”:

Select “Item” and then “Category”:

While clicking those fields, a visual will appear on the canvas:

Cool, right? Creating a report has never been this easy.

But now, you think that a pie chart is a better visual for your data.

To change the type of visual, just head over to the visualizations pane and click the pie chart icon:

Now you got your report in the visual type you preferred.

The problem is:

You think your visual and all its text is too small for your eyes.

No worries! You can edit your report however you like.

For example, feel free to enlarge your visual to the size you want. Simply click on the visual and drag its corners:

The next part is enlarging the texts — legend, detail labels, and title — of your report.

On the visualizations pane, go to the ‘Format’ section:

Here, you can change the format of your visuals. Each type of visual has different sets of options so an option on another might not be available on another.

To enlarge the text, simply go through the ‘Legend’, ‘Detail labels’, and ‘Title’ and then adjust the text size:

If you move out of the report builder without saving your report, the work you did would be for nothing.

To save your report, click ‘File’ from the tab list and select ‘Save’:

Power BI will then ask you to name your report.

Let’s name this report “First Power BI Report” and save:

After that, Power BI will inform you that your report has been saved.

If you’re serious about using Power BI, then you should learn and become efficient in creating Power BI reports. Without them, there will be no dashboards as the visuals on the dashboards came from reports.