Creating a Report

1. Make a new directory somewhere on your computer for this course project. I put mine in my home folder and named it dataviz-project, but you can choose whatever location and name that you like.

2. Open Power BI Desktop and, before doing anything else, click Options and settings on the bottom left of the home page. Then go into Options, and select Preview features under GLOBAL. Ensure that the following three boxes are checked (they may be already):

   • "Power BI Project (.pbip) save option"
   • "Store semantic model using TMDL format"
   • "Store reports using enhanced metadata format (PBIR)"

3. If you had to change any of those settings, restart Power BI after clicking OK to save.

   

   These are relatively new features in Power BI, which are currently optional but will soon become the default. Our CLI tests will not work unless these features are enabled.

4. Back on the home page, click Blank report to create a new report.

   

5. With the new report open, click on File on the top left to show the Power BI home page again. Go back into Options and settings → Options. This time, go to Regional Settings under CURRENT FILE. Set "Locale for import" to English (United States). This tells Power BI that, when importing data into the current report only, it should interpret dates, times, and numbers according to US conventions.

   

   The sample datasets that we created for this course – which you'll download shortly – have numbers, dates, etc. in the US style. Fortunately, Power BI allows you to configure the locale on a per-report basis without changing your system settings.

6. Once the locale is set, save the report as eshopp.pbip (not the default .pbix!) in the directory you created for this course (File → Save as → etc.).

7. In PowerShell, cd into the course directory containing your saved project.

From the course directory, submit the CLI tests.