What is Power BI?

In order to understand the concept of Power BI, let us first look at BI. What BI is and what significance it holds. The term BI (Business Intelligence) refers to the technologies, software, and processes that collect raw business data and convert it into meaningful information. BI allows businesses to integrate different datasets and analyze and present them in the form of visual insights. Business Intelligence provides actionable insights and helps a business make tactical decisions for improving the customer base and generating more value and profits. Custom visualizations, easy access to the raw data, and cloud services are some of the many features that Business Intelligence offers to a company. Power BI provides all such features through various tools and services available in the market, and Microsoft Power BI is one of the most preferred among them.

Power BI provides a scalable platform that helps the user to connect, visualize, and share the data with other users or stakeholders to gain deeper insights into the business. It is available in both free and paid versions. The free version only offers Power BI tools like Power BI Desktop and Power Q&A to reports or dashboards. Whereas, Power BI pro comes with Power BI Service that provides live report sharing, Power View, and Power BI Apps which gives great help while working with your Power BI projects. The source of the raw data can be Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, or a combination of both on-premises and cloud-based hybrid data warehouses. With Microsoft Power BI, users can analyze the data from different sources and share it with anyone using Power BI Service. Microsoft Power BI architecture enables non-technical users to get actionable insights into their business data without spending much time and resources to learn about the system. Using charts and graphs, users can understand the current state of the business and the actions needed to improve it. Power BI Definition: It is a collection of tools, services, and connectors that helps a user integrate, analyze, and visualize raw business data and convert it in the form of dashboards or live reports. These dashboards can then be shared with other users or stakeholders to make better decisions that eventually increase profitability.

WHY POWER BI?

Power BI gives reporting and analytical power to a business by providing competitive information to planners and decision-makers. With Power BI, the decision-makers can source, alter, and visualize the data using Artificial Intelligence and make better decisions based on the scenarios.

Below are some of the unique features that give Power BI an edge over other Business Intelligence tools:

·         Power BI allows direct queries on datasets if they cross a certain size limit. This saves the time required to load the data on the system and then perform the operations.

·         The Machine Learning feature of this tool helps users detect valuable trends and make predictions of the competitive market.

·         Get regular update notifications and have the latest Power BI version of Power BI Desktop and Power BI Report Server.

·         Power BI Service enables the users to benefit from high-end processing power with the latest algorithms and technology.

·         Its personalized dashboards allow the users to quickly access important visualizations and information out of many reports.

·         Alerts can be set up on key performance indicators (KPIs) to update the users on different metrics and measurements.

·         MS Power BI makes it easy to navigate and process complex datasets so that even a non-technical user can use reports and custom dashboards without spending much time on learning the interface.

·         The users get business insights for free on Power BI Desktop, and hence, it is the best for small businesses with fewer computation requirements.

·         Live reports and dashboards get updated in real-time as the data streams in, which allows the users to quickly resolve the problems and find new opportunities.

·         Whenever a dataset is updated, Power BI Service automatically refreshes the reports and the dashboards uploaded in the service cloud.

·         Power BI is easy to be integrated with other Microsoft products and services like Cortana. Users can access the graphs and charts directly using voice commands.

POWER BI ARCHITECTURE

Power BI architecture is a service built on top of Azure. There are multiple data sources that Power BI can connect to. Power BI Desktop allows you to create reports and data visualizations on the dataset. Power BI gateway is connected to on-premise data sources to get continuous data for reporting and analytics. Power BI services refer to the cloud services that are used to publish Power BI reports and data visualizations. Using Power BI mobile apps, you can stay connected to their data from anywhere. Power BI apps are available for Windows, iOS, and Android platforms.

ADVANTAGES OF POWER BI

Affordability

A major advantage of using Power BI is that it is inexpensive compared to other cloud service providers. The Power BI Desktop version is free of cost, you can download and start making the reports on your computer. However, if you wanna share your reports on the cloud you have to pay 9.99$ per user per month.

Excel Integration

In Power BI, you can also save data to Excel. No matter how great the data is presented using Graphs, maps and charts using data visualization tools, people still tend to have the data in their excel sheet. For example, you can get the data of a manufacturing unit for the past six months within a few clicks from Power BI.

Custom Visualization

Power BI offers a wide range of custom visualizations where developers can take your requirements and convert them to KPI’s, charts, graphs, maps etc.

Data Accessibility and Interactive visualization

Power BI provides great access to all the data source and the data sets that you create while designing the reports, in a centralized location. You can access the data anytime, anywhere from any device multiple times. Users can interact with the dashboards using filters, highlighting features, etc. by simple clicks.

Newly Developed Features

One of the other advantages is that Microsoft provides the users with monthly updates. Overall, Power BI is an amazing tool for data analysis and visualization. The pros far outbalance the drawbacks of Power BI.