Getting Started With Power BI Desktop: Installation

Power BI is becoming popular for a lot of reasons. Simply put, Power BI is “BI on your fingertips.” Companies looking to adopt BI technology need not look further. Power BI is easy to learn with its intuitive tools. Gone are the days when building BI solutions always involve massive resources.

Power BI lowers the bar in the BI know-how. It eliminates the complexities of building BI solutions.

Power BI has three (3) components: Power BI, Power BI Mobile, and Power BI Desktop. Power BI is “cloud-based business analytics service.” Power BI Mobile provides you the capability to get connected with your data anywhere you go. Power BI Desktop gives you the platform to author reports intuitively.

In this series, let’s take a look at Power BI Desktop.

Before we get started, let’s see how easy it is to download and install the app.

Go to http://powerbi.microsoft.com/desktop and download Power BI Desktop.

 

Once downloaded, execute the executable file to initialize the installation. Note: Power BI Desktop requires Internet Explorer 10 or higher versions.

Click Next, and just follow the installation wizard. Accept the terms in the app’s license agreement.

Specify where you want the app installed. I wouldn’t change the default.

Confirm installation of the Power BI Desktop app. Click the Install button

Then wait for the installation to complete. It should only take a couple of minutes.

After the installation is completed, the wizard confirms the success of the installation. Select the Launch Microsoft BI Desktop and click Finish.

Wait for the Power BI Desktop to initialize.

After the successful initialization of the app, the Power BI Desktop splash screen shows up. The screen provides some useful resources to learn more about Power BI. I’d keep the Show this page on startup option checked just so I have  a bookmark to these useful resources. You can also access this screen in the File tab then select Getting Started.

That’s it. Power BI Desktop is now ready for analytics or report development!

Next, let’s get some data for our Power BI Desktop.