Once you have loaded data into Power BI and modelled it, it is time to build reports. Power BI Desktop is the obvious choice, but you can also use Excel. Power BI Desktop is the best choice when you want to build eye-catching reports, reports that work well on mobile devices, and reports with a somewhat static structure. Excel is the best choice when you just want to explore data, or if you want to build financial-style reports.
Building reports in Power BI Desktop is just a matter of dragging and dropping visualisations on your report pages, and then publishing. You can build reports in the same way in the browser with the Power BI service, but this makes it hard to use version control. Once you have published a report, you pin visuals from it to a dashboard. Don’t forget to create mobile-optimised layouts for reports and dashboards. After publishing you can also use Quick Insights to find patterns, trends and correlations in your data automatically and you can use the Q&A feature to create visuals by typing in natural language queries in English and Spanish.
After you have published your report, you can connect a PivotTable in Excel on your desktop to the data behind that report using the Analyse in Excel feature. Of course, you can also import data into the Excel data model in the same way you can import data into Power BI and when you do this you can publish your Excel workbook up to Power BI too.
