Master Microsoft Power BI - Hands-on Training A - Z
Learn Data Modelling, Dashboards, Power Query, Joins and much more from Industry Professional (Project Based Training)
Master Microsoft Power BI - Hands-on Training A - Z free download
Learn Data Modelling, Dashboards, Power Query, Joins and much more from Industry Professional (Project Based Training)
Power BI: Overview, Features, and How To Use It
For modern businesses, data is the new lifeline. However, the mountain of digital information and data isn’t of any use if the organizations are not able to use it correctly. That’s where the need for business intelligence software arises. One such important software is Power BI. Implementation of Microsoft power bi aid you to pull out useful and actionable insight from your database. In this guide, we will let you know what power bi is, its features, how to use it, and its applications.
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is an intelligent platform that offers non-technical business owners tools for analyzing, aggregating, sharing data, and visualizing. The user interface of Power BI is intuitive for users who are familiar with MS-Excel. The deep integration with MS products makes it a versatile self-service tool that demands little upfront training.
Power BI free version is recommended for small and midsize business owners, however; the professional version is also available with a monthly subscription fee. You can download the Power BI Desktop application for windows 10 and Power BI Report Server to maintain reports and data on-premises.
Common uses of Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is mainly used to view the insights within your organization’s data. It aids you to connect disparate data, transform or clean it into a data model. You can also create graphs or charts to offer visuals of the data. All these can be shared with third-party Power BI users as well.
The data model created by users using Power BI can be utilized in many ways including examining “what if”, telling stories via data visualizations or charts within the data. Power BI report answers all the questions in real-time so to help you with forecasting and meet business metrics.
Power BI provides executive dashboards for managers or administrators thus giving management insights into how your organization is doing.
Who uses Power BI
This self-service tool can be used by employees to bring data into use however it’s mostly used by business intelligence professionals and data analysts who create models. If you don’t have an analytical background, you can still navigate Power BI & create reports.
Microsoft Power BI can be used by both management and department reps, to aid marketing reps and sales. It also provides data for the management to make progress toward the goals of the organization.
Furthermore, Power BI provides users with an admin portal to help configure the application of Power BI and for monitoring.
Key features of Power BI
Microsoft offers a number of in-built data analytic feature in Power BI which includes-
Artificial Intelligence
You can access text analytics and image recognition in Power BI to create machine learning models via Azure machine learning and automated machine learning.
Quick Insights
This feature enables you to create data subsets and automatically apply analytics to the given information.
Hybrid Deployment Support
This feature offers built-in connectors to connect with various data sources from Salesforce, vendors, and Microsoft.
Cortana Integration
It is a very popular feature on mobile devices as it enables you to verbally query data via natural language and accesses the result using Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana.
Common Data Model Support
Power BI provides support for the common data model via making use of an extensible collection of schemas like attributes, relationships, and entities.
Customization
Customization allows developers to make changes in the appearance of visualization and other tools. It also enables you to import new tools on the platform.
Self-Service Data Prep
With the help of Power Query, you can ingest, integrate, transform and enrich big information into power bi service. The ingested data can be easily shared across various Power BI reports models and dashboards.
Modeling View
The modeling view enables users to divide complicated data models into separate multi-select objects, diagrams, and common properties. You can modify properties and set display folders for the consumption of complicated data models.
Microsoft Power BI Components
Power bi contains a collection of apps that can be used on a desktop or mobile devices. It’s an on-premise version i.e., cloud-based. The components of it are meant to allow users to create and share insights in such a way that it fits business goals.
Power Query- a transformation and data mashup tool
Power View- a data visualization tool
Power Pivot- it’s a memory tabular modeling tool
Power Map- it’s a 3-D geospatial data visualization tool
Power Q&A-it’s a natural language questioning and answering engine
In addition to this, there are dozens of other data sources as well that help users connect to Power BI such as Oracle Database, Databases, Amazon Redshift, IBM databases, Azure data connections, and other online services.
Microsoft Power BI updates
Initially, Power BI was named Project Crescent which is bundled with SQL server. In September 2013, it was retitled Power BI. It based on features like Power Pivot, Microsoft added features, Power View, Power Query. In July 2015, it got officially released.
At present Microsoft updates Power Bi with the latest features and improvements. To get the application with the latest updates, you can download it from the Power BI site or get it from Windows Store.
It works by connecting information sources and offering a dashboard to the user. The data is pulled from the Salesforce CRM and is automatically refreshed. Power BI desktop connects to the on-premise data source for manual refreshing and setting up.
How to use Power BI
Power BI Desktop enables analysts to create data connections, reports, and data models. It begins by connecting data sources. User query the data for creating reports based on organization needs. The report then gets published to the Power BI service and is shared. You can add permission for the colleagues when comes to edit the report.
Power BI Cost
Power BI service is available in three levels namely Power BI Desktop, Power BI Premium, and Power BI Pro. The desktop version is totally free of cost however, the Pro version costs $9.99/user/month and Power BI Premium costs depend on the size of deployment.
