To make informed decisions, analysis and understanding of data is very important. Ability to quickly transform raw data into meaningful insights has become more important, in today’s digital world. This complete process of data transformation using intelligence (analysis & analytics) into business insights is known as Business Intelligence. Quick analysis and analytics of digital data can be performed by an intelligent and analytical tool or application. This is where we require business intelligence tools like Power BI.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a popular and powerful business intelligence tool developed by Microsoft. Power BI stands for ‘Power Business Intelligence’. Power BI has the ability to easily transform structured and unstructured data from multiple sources into interactive reports and dashboards.
Microsoft Power BI serves as a software suite for multiple applications. Power BI is a data visualization platform mainly used for purposes of business intelligence. It is a software tool and set of software connectors that helps to transform the data from many sources. Important Power BI components are:
- Power BI Desktop
- Power BI Service
- Power BI Mobile
- Power BI Report Server
- Power BI Data Gateway
What data Power Bi can transform
- Microsoft Power BI can be used to transform data from multiple data sources like excel, databases, data warehouses and hybrid (cloud & on-premise) data sources.
- Power BI can transform data from different domains like sales, customer, financial, social media data, or website analytic data.
- Power BI can also help in transformation of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data.
- Based on this transformed data, Power Bi can generate interactive visualizations and reports that help organizations in decision making.
Data Visualization
- Data visualization is a process to represent information into visual format. Visual elements like charts, graphs, or maps are used for data visualization.
- It simply translates large and complex numerical data into an easily viewable format.
- Data visualization tools like Power BI, enhance and automate this process of visual communication for more accuracy and detail.
- Data Visualization tools and technologies divide and group data into different categories and themes.
Key role of Data Visualization Tools
Key roles played by data visualization tools and technologies:
- Unlocking key values – Data visualization helps in processing, transformation of large amounts of data, so that it can be easily understood.
- Identify patterns – By data visualization, we can explore and identify new patterns and insights from the data. This can help users to identify more important areas and can focus on specific areas from the data.
- Easy to understand – Data visualization will help translate the data into an easily understood format.
- More Attractive and Engaging to Users – Next-level visualizations display data more sensibly by using the best chart and formatting options. This will enhance user engagement with the visualization and make it easier and quicker to interpret and comprehend.
- Display complex relationships – Complex data relationship can be presented in to standard & structured reporting and easily usable & interactive dashboards. These dashboards process real-time data to provide real-time analytics.
Features of Power BI
- Data Import – Power BI allows for the import of data from various sources including databases to perform analysis on it using interactive dashboards, informational reports, and easy-to-use transcripts. Power BI Desktop is interactive in that and allows users to create a report without technical knowledge.
- Visualization Tools – Attractive visualization is one of the remarkable feature of Power BI. Using this, platform users can develop bar charts, line charts, funnel diagrams, graphs and maps etc.
- Data Integration – Using data import and get options, data can be collected from various data sources. Power BI allows to filter data based on the requirement and data in need.
- Power Query – Power BI’s rich environment for cleaning, transformation, and loading data.
- Power Pivot – Power BI allows to create complex data models with calculated columns and measures that can be used further in advanced analysis. These calculated columns and measures known as Power Pivot.
- Power BI Costing – Power BI is available in different versions like free, Pro and Premium license.
- For individual and development purpose its free versions Power BI Desktop can be used.
- For professional purpose its individual license version Power BI Pro can be used.
- For commercial purpose Power BI Premium license can be used. This is intended for large-scale deployment and embedded analytics.
- Power BI NLP – Power BI provides capability of Natural Language Processing (NLP). You can write queries in normal English language and can get insights.
- Data Discovery – Power BI allows to explore and navigate through data without using complex queries and formulas.
- Report Sharing – Power BI allows to collaborate with other team members and share their reports and dashboards within the team. Interactive reports can be embedded into websites and applications.
- Power BI Mobile App – Power BI offers mobile application for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices. Users can view mobile optimized reports, share insights and set alerts within mobile apps.
- AI with Power BI – Power BI has provided AI features which increases its capability multiple times. Power BI provides advanced features like Natural Language Query(NLQ), Predictive Analytics and Forecasting, Smart Data Discovery and Visualization, Decomposition tree in Power BI, Sentiment Analysis with AI.
Advantages of Power BI
- Easy to use – Power BI has a user-friendly interface that allows users to create visualizations and business intelligence reports quite easily.
- Data source Integration – Power BI can integrate with several data sources like Excel, SQL Server, cloud services like Azure, salesforce, etc. Power BI makes it very easy to import and analyze data from many sources.
- Power BI offers customized dashboards where users can personalize their dashboard and reports to present information more meaningfully.
- Real-time data: Power BI does real-time data processing. With real-time data processing, real-time insights, dashboard and report are available. Automatic selections with refresh options ensure that when the refreshes happen, your visualizations show the most recent data.
- Collaboration: Power BI allows to share reports and dashboards within teams and with other applications.
- Mobile Availability: The Power BI mobile app allows accessing dashboards and reports from anywhere.
Disadvantages of Power BI
- Limited customization options – Power BI offers a vast variety of ways for customization. But it provides more easy integration with Microsoft tools and clouds. Users will definitely have certain limitations on creating absolutely unique visualization and reports especially in free version of Power BI.
- Cost – Power BI free version is only of individual learning and development purposes. To get advanced features or additional storage, one would have to get the Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium license.
- Machine Learning – Power BI has limited machine learning capabilities compared to other data analytical tools, which sometimes can limit it from doing advanced analysis.
- Learning Curve – People who are new to data analytics tools find Power BI complex and pretty hard to learn.
- Predictive Analytics Limited – Power BI offers basic predictive analytics. Advanced predictive analytics require use of other tools and software.
Summary
In this article we explored and learned about Power BI. Following topics were discussed: