Organizing data sources

- [Narrator] The term dataflow is a bit of a misnomer because it doesn't necessarily refer to a single ETL process for creating a data table. A dataflow is really a folder that can contain multiple queries within it, whether they are entities, common data models, models, or from other dataflows. You commission access to and refresh an entire dataflow at the same time. I created a workspace called PBI dataflows and Power BI that I want to use to create my dataflow set. On the home page, let's select this workspace to enter into it. We see that in this workspace, we do not have any dashboard set up and if we go into the dataflow section, we do not have any dataflow set up either. To add a new dataflow to this workspace, we go to the create menu at the top and select Dataflow. On the next page we see several options for creating a new query within this dataflow, whether it's by defining new entities, linking entities from other dataflows, importing a model, or attaching a common data model folder. Note that the option to link from other entities is a Power BI Premium specific capacity at the point when this course was filmed. Let's start by selecting Define New Entities and the Add New Entities option at the bottom. This takes us into the power query online functionality. Now we select the source of our data. Let's just create a small data table where we manually enter our data by looking for the blank table option which we find near the bottom. Now, in the screen we can enter our values in power query online manually. Let's create a single column in a table which I'm going to call Dataflow Types, and I'm going to enter entity, CDM, dataflow, and model and rename this table Dataflow Types. We select Next at the bottom of the screen. This takes us into the query editor window where we can see that there are further transformation functions available for this query. For now, let's just hit save and close at the bottom. In the next screen, it asks us to give a name to our dataflow. We already named the query entity within the dataflow. Now we want to name the entire dataflow. I'm going to call this Testing Tables and leave the description area blank because we don't need to fill it out, then hit the save. We now see our new data table in the dataflow entity list. If we expand the arrows next to the name, we see the metadata for the fields within this connection and we just have a string for a single field. From here we can add more entities to this dataflow by selecting Add Entities from the top, for example. Now if we go back into our workspace and go to the dataflow section, we see our new dataflow called Testing Tables in the list.