How to Load CSV Data to Power BI Desktop

In this guide, I am going to tell you How to load CSV data to Power BI Desktop and plot a chart with the help of imported CSV data. In the previous tutorial, we have seen how to load data from the MySQL database to Power BI Desktop.

As we know, Power is one of the most popular BI ( Business Intelligence ) tools offered by Microsoft and it allows us to load data from numerous data sources but in this guide, we will focus on getting data from only CSV files.

Before going deep dive into this article, we will discuss some important terms so that you can achieve more clarity with this article.

What is CSV ( Commas Separated Value )?

CSV ( Commas Separated Files ) file is a simple plain-text-based file that contains values separated by commas or any other delimiter like the pipe ( | ), etc.
CSV files allow for the storing of the data in the form of tabular format and it is always saved with a .csv extension.

For example, you can see the below data which is simple CSV data.

name,age,email,country
Vishvajit,21,[email protected],India
John, 22,[email protected],USA
Mr.X, 30,[email protected],Denmark
harshita,[email protected],India

In the above CSV data, all the values are separated by commas delimiter, and the first row represents the header of the file. In my case, the first row ( name, age, email, country ) represents the headers of the CSV file.

I hope you understand the meaning of CSV ( Commas Separated Data ).

What is BI ( Business Intelligence )?

BI stands for Business Intelligence. It is a set of processes, architecture, and technologies to collect, analyze, transformed, and visualize the data that derived profitable business actions.

There are several tools BI tools available in the market that allows, extracting data, data analysis, creating reports, dashboard, graphs, charts, and maps for the user along with details intelligence about the data. Power BI is one of the popular tools of them.

What is Power BI ( Business Intelligence )?

Power BI is one of the most popular BI ( Business Intelligence ) tools offered by Microsoft Corporation. Power BI allows us to import or load data from numerous sources and build interactive data visualization so that organizations and individuals can take better business decisions on the basis of data.

Power BI was first released in 2014 by Microsoft which primarily focuses on BI ( Business Intelligence ) Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover insights that are important and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Power BI consists of several elements that work together to convert raw data to meaningful insight, These elements start from here.

Image Source:- Microsoft

• Power BI Dekstop:- Power BI Desktop is an application for the Windows operating system and it is completely free of cost.
• Power BI Service:- It is Saas ( Software as a Service ) which means it is an online platform of Power BI that it’s called Power BI service.
• Power BI Mobile:- Power BI mobile app for windows, iOS, and Android devices.

I hope you understood a little about Microsoft Power BI, I know this is not a Power BI tutorial, but here I am just giving an overview of Power BI.

For this tutorial, I’m using the Power BI desktop because it comes free of cost from Microsoft and allows us to connect multiple sources of data and combine them into a data model.

Why do you require Power BI ( Business Intelligence )?

Here I am giving a sales data example, In your case, data can be related to any domain like sales data, college data, organization data, medical data, banking data, etc.

Suppose an organization or client has some sales data and they want to take business decisions on the basis of sales data So that they can turn meaningful data or meaningful insights into a profitable business.

For making business decisions easy, Power BI comes into the picture because it has the capability to extract data from various sources, Transform the loaded data according to the organization’s need or client’s need and convert it into meaningful information and then make interacting data visualization for actionable business decisions.

After making an interactive data visualization dashboard, you can share it with your team, company boss, or someone you want to So that they can think about how to turn meaningful data into profitability.

Now, it’s time to load CSV data to Power BI Desktop.

How to load CSV data to Power BI Desktop?

To connect CSV with the Power BI Desktop, you have to follow some basic steps described below.

1. Open Power BI Desktop and click on Get data from another source.
   

   

2. Choose Text/CSV and click on Connect.
   
   

   

3. Choose CSV ( Commas Separated Values ) file from the system and click on Load.
   

   

4. After clicking on Load, your data will be successfully loaded.
5. To see the loaded data, click on the Data icon ( ) but one problem will occur here, your header will also be a part of the data. However, this should be a header as you can see below screenshot.
   
   

   

6. To make the first row a header, Go to the Home menu and click on Transform Data and choose Transform Data from the menu.
   
   

   

7. And after that, Click on the Use First Row as Headers inside the Transform section.
   

   

8. Click on Close & and Apply in the top left corner.
   

   

9. Now, the first row of loaded data is successfully set as a header. as you can see.

So, this is how you can load CSV data to Power BI ( Business Intelligence ) Desktop. Now, I’m gonna visualize the data using Clustered Column Chart.

In Clustered Column Chart, I will show the total number of Male and Female students who exist in a Particlul country.

What is Clustered Column Chart?

Clustered Column Chart is one of the most widely used data visualizations in Power BI.Clustered Column Chart or Column chart is very useful to display a comparison of multiple series as in a vertical column where the length of the verticle column is proportional to the measure of the data or category.

In Clustered Column Chart, each column shares the same category so that they can group together.

Let’s create a Clustered column chart or Column chart from the data which we loaded from the CSV file earlier.

1. To create make interacting Clustered column chart click on Clustered column chart icon in the Visualization panel.
   

   

2. In the column chart, I wanna show you the total number of Male and Female students in each country. To make this visualization you have to follow the following steps.
   • Drag and Drop the Country column to X-axis.
   • Drag and Drop the First Name to Y-axis.
   • Drag and drop the Gender column to the Legend.
3. After performing the above step 2, Clustered Column chart will look like this.
   

   

To show the total number of Male and Female students in a particular country, Mouse Hover over a particular country column, and after you will see a small pop-up that contains the Country name, Gender, and Count of the First name which represents the total number of Male or Female.

Conclusion

So finally, we have seen how to load CSV data to Power BI Desktop along with Steps and Clustered column chart. There are nothing more complicated steps to load CSV data to the Power BI desktop, you have to just choose the CSV option from data sources and load the data.

As a Data analysis and Data engineer, Sometimes your requirement is to load CSV data to make interacting data visualization, then you can follow all the steps that we have followed throughout this guide.

I hope you don’t have any confusion regarding establishing a connection between CSV and Power BI desktop.

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Thanks for your valuable time…. 🧑‍💻🧑‍💻❤️❤️