Modern organizations rely heavily on data, and we’re producing more of it than ever.
However, accumulating mountains of digital data is only a little help if organizations can’t understand it. Fortunately, business intelligence tools can help with that.
If you’re considering using a platform to extract practical, actionable information from your data. You are in the right location. This article reviews the fundamentals of Microsoft’s main business intelligence (BI) product, Power BI, and what it can achieve for your company. Read on.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is the general term for a collection of cloud-based apps and services that assist organizations in gathering, managing, and analyzing data from many sources via a user-friendly interface. Notably, Microsoft Power BI Services and other business intelligence solutions can be utilized for various tasks.
Using primarily visually appealing and easy-to-understand charts and graphs, Power BI collects, processes, and transforms data into actionable insights. Users may now write and share concise summaries of what’s happening in their business.
Microsoft Power BI Key Features and Functionality
1. Extract Insights from Large Datasets
The default row count for Excel spreadsheets is 1,048,576. However, sometimes users frequently need to examine datasets with more than a million rows. Power BI compresses your data, allowing you to mine valuable information from huge datasets. With a solid data model, Power BI can assist you in analyzing datasets with more than 100 million rows.
Working with truly massive datasets that include more than a few hundred million rows requires the usage of Power BI’s features. Users of Power BI, for instance, can create aggregation tables. By accelerating searches by using pre-calculated data, aggregates shorten the time it takes to produce your reports.
Furthermore, with Power BI Premium, more processing power can be enabled. For even faster query times and refresh capabilities, you may acquire dedicated cloud Power BI Premium instances if your company needs to store very big datasets in Power BI.
2. Analyze Your Datasets in Excel
Excel continues to be the world’s most widely used data analysis program, with over 750 million users. Given how many individuals regularly utilize the product, it’s hardly surprising that users frequently ask for an Excel export of the data shown in reports and dashboards.
However, how to provide this flexibility while upholding the integrity of the connected reporting environment has presented a problem for BI analysts. Fortunately, Microsoft released Analyze in Excel with this in mind. Users can now create tabular and ad-hoc reporting using Excel by connecting directly to the underlying Power BI data.
Also, when slicing and dicing your data, you can utilize the same datasets referenced in other Power BI reports if you are comfortable constructing PivotTables in Excel.
Finally, users can update their Excel connections to acquire the most recent data from Power BI databases. For enterprises torn between the two platforms, this accessibility changes the game.
3. Easily Source and Transform Data with Power Query
Need help joining, pivoting, and filtering your data? Using Power Query, Power BI makes it simple to import and transform data from various sources. It is intended to be a low/no-code experience, allowing analysts without an understanding of SQL or programming to join, convert, and further alter their data using a simple user interface.
Choose from various prebuilt SaaS connectors to connect to files or databases. Alternatively, you can connect to on-premises and cloud databases, including SQL Server, Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery.
4. Re-Use Datasets Across Different Reports and Dashboards
Getting all of your reports to agree on one version of the truth is difficult, and it frequently results in metrics and KPI definitions that need to be more consistent. One of Power BI’s most alluring capabilities is constructing measures in a data model and then re-using these calculations across several related reports.
No matter which reports you’re reading, you can ensure that “Gross Profit” and “Sales Revenue” return identical values by specifying your KPI calculations in core datasets.
As opposed to other data visualization tools, which frequently create KPIs in each report separately, Power BI has this feature.
5. Automatic Data Refreshes
By automating renewing your datasets, Power BI’s scheduled refresh function relieves you of time-consuming, manual report updates. Your team may discover and share insights effortlessly by rapidly and accurately updating your data.
What is Power BI Service?
The Power BI service is a secure Microsoft-hosted cloud service that allows users to access dashboards, reports, and Power BI apps – a type of content that integrates linked dashboards and reports — through a web browser or mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Notably, Power BI Service may be licensed via Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium.
What is Power BI Pro?
Not much distinguishes Power BI Pro from Power BI Desktop. They have the same report refresh capacity, storage and file upload restrictions, and visualization options. The main distinction between Pro and Free is that you may privately share your data, reports, and dashboards with others, provided they also have a Power BI Pro subscription.
The Pro license also includes some additional bonuses. As an illustration, Pro enables you to build app workspaces to assemble groups of relevant dashboards and reports and build easily accessible content packs.
What is Power BI Premium?
An alternative option to get Power BI is through Power BI Premium. With Premium, you pay for the storage and processing power you wish to reserve for your company rather than purchasing licenses for individual users as you would with Power BI Pro. Users can choose the amount of memory they require to run the Power BI platform from among six capacity models, each of which has various amounts.
Enterprise-level companies that produce massive volumes of data and need complete access to the app are the target market for Premium. Notably, paying for Premium entitles you to a dedicated piece of processing power for your business intelligence workloads, with Microsoft providing and supporting the essential infrastructure.
Instead of paying for a license, a premium allows you to utilize a certain amount of processing resources exclusively. A Power BI license is necessary in addition to Power BI Premium for users who want to produce and publish reports, share their dashboards, and interact with other users in-app workspaces.
However, Power BI Premium will cover read-only use, so no additional license is needed for users who only need to access and consume Power BI material.
Bottomline
These are just some of the key features and functionalities of Microsoft Power BI Services. Apart from fantastic data visualization and representation, Power BI has several additional capabilities, like content packs containing sample dashboard reports, natural language allowing users to choose the language, custom visualization, and DAX functions.
Notably, the platform continues to evolve, with new features and updates released regularly, providing users with powerful data analysis and visualization tools.
