Power BI is anything but another name in the BI sector, Microsoft group worked through a significant lot of time to construct a major umbrella called Power BI, this huge umbrella isn’t only a Visualization device such as Tableau, it isn’t only a self-benefit information examination instrument such as PivotTable and PivotChart in Excel, it isn’t only a cloud-based device for data analysis. Power BI is a blend of those, and it is substantially more. With Power BI you can associate with numerous information sources (wide scope of information sources upheld, and more information sources add to the list every month).
For making the best business decisions, it is important to fetch relevant information from the data and present it in a lucid manner. Microsoft’s Power BI suite is designed to quickly turn your data into useful information. This “ Getting Started with Microsoft Power BI ” post explains everything you need to know about Power BI data visualization tool-set.
In this post, you will learn about the following:
- Why is Power BI important?
- What is Power BI?
- Processes in Power BI
- Do you want to be a Power BI Crackerjack?
- Comparing leading analytics tool
Why is Power BI Important?
Well, following are the reasons why Power BI is such an important BI tool.
- Power BI is built on the convention of best BI products available – SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and Microsoft Excel. Power BI gives you the option to connect with these
products Apart from the legacy, Power BI is Being built/rebuilt using the latest technologies like HTML 5.0, cloud computing, column store databases & smartphone mobile apps- Microsoft has opened the custom visuals gallery for open source contributions which adds value to the community
- Trend towards self-service business intelligence indicates Microsoft’s leading position in this space
Alright, now that you know the importance of Power BI in Analytics field, let’s understand what is Power BI?
What is Power BI?
Microsoft’s Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service for analyzing and visualizing data.
Power BI lets you be productive and creative with the reports and analytics. Churning out useful information from the data and creating a visuals reports is a multi-step process, let me brief you about the steps.
Processes in Power BI
Go from data to insight to option in a series of steps. It starts with:
1. Connecting to your data:
Power BI lets you connect to a wide variety of data sources. And, you can either use Power BI Desktop or Power BI Services to connect to your data. Your options are to import itinto Power BI or to upload your file.
Fig1. Connecting data from various sources to Power BI
2. The shaping of data:
Once your data has been loaded, you can shape the data according to your needs. Shaping or transforming the data includes renaming columns or tables, changing the text to numbers, removing rows, setting the first row as headers, and so on.
Fig 2. Shaping or Transforming of data
3. Modeling of data:
This step is basically to enhance the data with relationships, calculations, measures, hierarchies etc that can be used to find business insights. Also, you can write a query to enhance data for better visualizations and analytics.
Fig 3. Modeling of data
4. Data visualization:
This is probably where you play around with data and visualization types. With a variety of visual tools and custom visual gallery, you can create stunning reports for your organization effectively. So, a business user simply could mash up the data without writing even a single line of code. Exactly, It’s that easy!!
Fig 4. Visualizing your transformed data
Now, Suppose you want to share these analytics reports with your organization.
5. Publishing data reports:
Well, using Power BI Services, you can export or publish reports securely and set up automatic data refresh which provides near-real-time analytics of trends and indicators for everyone.
Fig 5. Publish your reports using Power BI services
With real-time power BI dashboards, you can get a 360-degree view of your business and you can instantly check when your business needs your attention.
Power BI gateways let you connect with SQL Server databases, Analytical Services, and many other data sources to your dashboard in Power BI and reporting portals, embed Power BI reports and dashboards to give you a unified experience.
This is how a dashboard looks like:
In awe yet? Let me add more to your fascination because Power BI gives you more.
Get Integrated with Power BI
To deliver your solution even faster you can integrate your application or service with Power BI using standard-based REST API.
Make business decisions from anywhere
No matter wherever you are, using Power BI Mobile apps for Windows or IOS you can access all your business data.
Alright so, now having learned what is Power BI, and its processes, I feel you should ask yourself
Do you want to be a Power BI expert?
Get skilled in the following components of Power BI:
- Power Query: used to search, access, and transform public and/ or internal data sources.
- Power Pivot: used in data modeling for in-memory analytics.
- Power View: analyze, visualize and display data as an interactive data visualization using Power View.
- Power Map: Brings data to life with interactive geographical visualization.
- Power BI Service: share data views and workbooks which are refresh-able from on-premises and cloud-based data sources.
- Power BI Q&A: Ask questions and get immediate answers with natural language query.
- Data Management Gateway: By using this component you get periodic data refreshers, expose tables and view data feeds.
- Data Catalog: easily discover and reuse queries using Data Catalog. Metadata can be facilitated for search functionality.
So, now that you know what are the skills you need to master, let’s move further and see what are the leading companies where Power BI is being used.
Now the question arises why Power BI is so popular in the market?
To answer that I have compared three cutting-edge self-service BI tools aimed at giving you direct access to all the insights your data can provide.
Comparing leading Analytics tools – Power BI vs Tableau vs QlikView
| Metrics | Microsoft Power BI | Tableau Desktop | QlikView |
| Free Version Available | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ |
| Mobile Versions | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Point-in-time Analytics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Real-Time Analytics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Predictive Analytics | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ |
| Data Prep Tools | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Tools to Blend/ Join/ Integrate Data | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Semantic Querying/ Natural Language | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ |
| Social Media Analytics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Visualizations Feature | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sharing/ Collaboration Tool | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
I think now its clear why Power BI stands out from other BI tools.
So wait not, download Power BI Desktop and see how Power BI makes it easy to combine your data, find new insights, and share them with others.
Source: Edureka! Blog by Shanshank
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