HOW-TO Connect to Data in Power BI #

type how-to
level beginner
topic power-query

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Overview #

The first step to creating a report in the Power BI Desktop application is to load the data you want to visualize in your report. Power BI Desktop has a built-in tool that makes it easy to load data from almost any data source.

Power BI reports can load and combine data from multiple (different) data sources. But this article will cover one of the simplest scenarios - loading data from a single Excel file that is stored on your local drive. The specific Excel file used in this article is one of the sample files that is stored on your local drive when you install the Power BI Desktop application.

TERMINOLOGY: the data ingestion tool is called "Power Query", but you don't need to remember that when yu first get started