Now that you know the basics of Power BI, let’s jump into some hands-on experiences and a guided tour. Your video tour guide is **Will Thompson**, a Program Manager on the Power BI team at Microsoft. There are a few guest guides too, a little later on in the course.

As Will explains the many things you can do with Power BI, keep in mind that all of these activities, and all the analysis you can do with Power BI, generally follow a common flow. The **common flow** of activity in Power BI is the following:

* Bring data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report.
* Publish to the Power BI service, where you create new visualizations or build dashboards
* Share your dashboards with others, especially people who are on the go
* View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in Power BI Mobile apps

![](media/0-1-intro-using-power-bi/c0a1_1.png)

As mentioned earlier, you might spend all your time in the **Power BI service**, getting data and creating dashboards – that’s just fine. Someone else on your team might spend all of her time in **Power BI Desktop**, which is fine too. In order to help you understand the full continuum of Power BI and what it can do, we’ll show you all of it… then you can decide how to use it to your best advantage.

So let’s jump in, and let Will guide us through the experience. The first order of business is to understand the basic building blocks of Power BI, which will provide a solid basis for learning how Power BI turns data into cool reports and visuals.