Power BI User Guide

Power BI reports use page navigation to display different information. Reports can be single paged or have multiple pages of data.

When you open a report you will see the report pages listed on the left side of the screen.

The view of Power BI reports can be changed to appear better on your screen depending on what type of device/size of screen you are using. To change the layout view of the report, click on the View button – which is a rectangular box on the top right of the screen.

• Fit to Width (Fits the report to the width of the screen)
• Fit to Page (Contracts the report to fit within the confines of the web page)
• Actual Size (Widens the report on each side to take up more of the white space within the webpage)

At the top right of most reports you will see an Information Button as a circle with an “i”.  This button will bring a popup page that give you detail about the purpose of the report and its guided usage.  It also has definitions of the elements in the report if there are terms that are unfamiliar.

Clicking on the information button opens a separate web page with a thorough description of the report and all key terms defined.

Sample Report Definition Page

To Export data from a specific table in any report to an Excel or CSV, you have to first hover your cursor over the table.  When you hover, you will see an ellipsis appear in the top right corner (highlighted below - this can sometimes be hard to see but you must carefully hover on that actual table of data you want to export).  Note that there may be multiple data tables on an individual report.



After you see the ellipsis in the top right corner of the table, you can click on it and select Export Data.

This will prompt for you to choose your export type (both are not always available) Data with Current Layout or Summarized Data.  For all purposes, these are the same - although the summarize data option will allow you to export 500,000 rows and the current layout will allow 150,000 rows.  

Power BI Reports often contain parameters in the form of filters and slicers.

These are parameters a user can use to slice and dice to find only the desired data in a report.

Some slicers allow you to select all options (usually long lists) and some only allow you to select one option at a time.

In general filters should keep their values from page to page of a report.

Filters will also be persistent once set for every time you login. That means that if you set a Career filter to show Undergradaute, that will remain set at Undergraduate even if you leave the website and come back.  All filters will have this behavior, and can be rest using the rest button.

If you have set of filters that you regularly set, but don't want them to be the default and prefer not to click through each one every time, you can set a personal bookmark that will store the filter settings and take you back to the specific view quickly.

Some filters/slicers may contain many values not able to all be seen at once, such as the Name filter shown below and included in many reports. For these fields, Power BI has a feature allowing you to search through the list of available values. You can type the value you are searching for directly into the search box. Even partial matches will show.

You can also clear all of the filters at anytime by clicking on the Reset button available at the top right of the reports.

On any table of data in a report, users have the option to sort by any of the fields listed in the table. This can be done in two different ways.Most easily, users can click on the field column heading in the table.  This will automatically sort the data in the table.  Alternatively, users can select the ellipsis in the top right corner, sort by, and select the desired field for sorting.