Are you facing difficulties in providing more accurate reporting and analysis? Is it getting difficult to understand the latest trends, market conditions or respond to change quickly? Do you have trouble obtaining important business reports? Or is it getting very challenging to convert the raw data into actionable insights? If yes, then Power BI is the solution.
If you are using excel, you might have found it difficult to work with the large data which ultimately creates roadblocks for data-driven enterprises. To make an informed decision with the use of data, the powerful business intelligence system can come to the rescue. Let’s understand the power of Power BI.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service offered by Microsoft that allows anyone to envisage or evaluate data with speed, efficiency, and accuracy. It is an interactive data visualization tool that makes it easy to share data across enterprises. It helps in delivering valuable insights to make quick as well as an informed decisions. It also helps in transforming raw and unprocessed data into insightful and stunning visuals for the officials to communicate as well as understand the business better. Power BI has been always helpful as it provides access to customized reports and interactive dashboards which help to have a comprehensive 360-degree view of the business.
Types of Power BI tools
Power BI Desktop: Power BI desktop is one of the important authoring and publishing tools for Power BI. Developers a well as the power users use it to create brand new models and reports from scratch. Moreover, it is free.
Power BI service: Software where power BI data models, reports, dashboards are hosted. Administration, sharing, collaboration happen in the cloud. The license fee is $10/users/month
Power BI data gateway: Power BI data gateway works as a bridge between the Power BI service and an on-premise data source such as DirectQuery, Import, Live Query. It is installed by BI Admin.
Power BI report server: It can host paginated reports, KPIs, mobile reports, and power BI desktop reports. It is generally installed and managed by the IT team and it requires an update every 4 months. The user can easily modify the Power BI reports and other reports created by the development team.
Power BI mobile apps: Power BI mobile app is available for iOS, android, windows. It can be managed with the help of Microsoft Intune. You can use this tool to view reports and dashboards on the Power BI service report server.
The architecture of Power BI
Data Integration: An enterprise needs to work with data that comes from different sources, which are available in different file formats. The data should be extracted from a different source that can be from multiple servers or databases. This data is integrated into one standard format in a common performing area.
Data Processing: The integrated data is still not prepared for visualization, as the data needs processing. The data is generally pre-processed. For instance, redundant values or missing values will be removed from the data set. The business rule needs to be applied to the data when it is cleaned. You can also load that data back again in the Data Warehouse.
Data Presentation: Once the data is loaded and processed, it is visualized properly with the usage of different visualization that Power Bi has to offer. The use of dashboards and report helps one represent data more innately. This visual report helps the end-users of the organizations to take the business decision based on the insights.
5 reasons to use Power BI
Before considering Power BI, it is important to understand if it is useful for your business or not? Here are 5 reasons to choose Power BI.
A quick start: You will be able to get insights promptly with an uncomplicated setup. You don’t need any training or included dashboards for services such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Microsoft Dynamics.
Streamlined publication and distribution: Instead of emailing large files or putting them on a shared drive, the analysts can easily upload reports and visualizations to the Power BI service, and their data is refreshed every time the primary dataset is updated.
Real-time information: The dashboards can get updated in real-time as the data is pushed or streamed in, it gives the viewers the ability to solve different problems and identify opportunities real fast. Any report or dashboard can be factory sensors, social media sources, or anything from which time-sensitive data can be collected or transmitted.
Cortana integration: Power BI is compatible with Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana. Yes, now the users can verbally ask questions to access charts as well as graphs. This can be especially helpful for those who use mobile devices.
Artificial Intelligence: Power BI users can access image recognition and text analytics, create machine-learning models as well as integrate with Azure Machine Learning.
Conclusion
Power BI is highly customization with users able to personalize dashboards and interfaces. You can visualize data your way and you can also create stunning visualizations. So, of course, the future holds the best for Power BI and it is here to stay for many more years ahead.
Will you be using Power BI for your business? It’s time to start thinking.
