In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create relationships between tables in Microsoft Power BI. The good news is that you do this with a click and point wizard—eliminating the need to write any SQL commands.

(This article is part of our Power BI Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Relationships in Power BI

In Power BI, a relationship documents the common elements between tables.

In the example we’ll use here, we have two tables from a sales system: customers and orders.

• The common element is the customerNumber.
• The customer table contains the customer name.
• The orders table contains order amount, product sold, etc.

So, if you want to print the customer name on a sales report, for instance, you need to tell BI what columns link these two tables.

Sample data

To follow along with our example, download this data:

• customers.csv
• orders.csv

Import the two tables.