What is Power BI?
Power BI is a Business Intelligence and visualization tool for transforming data from various data sources into interactive dashboards and analysis reports. Power BI presents cloud-based services for interactive visualizations with a simple interface for end users to create accounts and dashboards.
Different versions of Power BI are used for other platforms, such as Desktop, Service-based (SaaS), and Power BI mobile apps. It provides several software connectors and benefits for business intelligence.
In this Power BI training, you will understand all the basic concepts and get a basic understanding of using the Power BI tool.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence directs the technologies, software, and processes that collect raw business data and transform it into meaningful information. BI enables businesses to integrate different data sets and analyze them and present them in the form of visual insights.
Business Intelligence provides actionable insights and helps the business make tactical decisions to improve the customer base and create more excellent value and profits.
Custom visualizations, easy access to raw data, and cloud services are some of the many features Business Intelligence offers companies. Power BI provides all these features through various tools and services available in the market, and Microsoft Power BI is among the most preferred.
Why Power BI?
Power BI provides businesses with reporting and analysis power by providing competitive intelligence to planners and decision-makers. With Power BI, decision makers can acquire, edit and visualize data using artificial intelligence and make better decisions based on scenarios.
Some unique features provided by Power BI that give an advantage over other Business Intelligence tools are shown below:
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Power BI permits straightforward queries on datasets if they exceed a specific size limit. This saves the time required to load system data and perform operations.
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The tool’s machine learning feature helps users spot valuable trends and predict the competitive market.
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Get frequent update notifications and have the latest version of Power BI Desktop and Power BI Report Server.
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Power BI enables users to utilize cutting-edge computing power with the latest algorithms and technology.
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Its personalized dashboards allow users to quickly access critical visualizations and information from multiple reports.
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Alerts can be set on key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep users updated on various metrics and measurements.
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MS Power BI makes navigating and processing complex data sets easy, so even a non-technical user can use reports and custom dashboards without paying much time to learn the interface.
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Users get free business insights on Power BI Desktop; therefore, it is best for small businesses with more minor computing requirements.
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Live reports and dashboards update in real-time as data flows in, allowing users to quickly solve problems and find new opportunities.
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Power BI automatically updates reports and dashboards uploaded to the service cloud whenever a dataset is updated.
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Power BI integrates easily with other Microsoft products and services, such as Cortana. Users can access charts and graphs directly using voice commands.
Types of Power BI Apps
This Power BI desktop tutorial will teach you the types of Power BI tools. Some essential Power BI Apps are:
Power BI Desktop
Power BI desktop is the direct authoring and publishing tool for Power BI. Developers, and advanced users use it to make brand new models and assemblages from scrape.
Power BI service
Online software as a service (SaaS) where Powe Bl’s data models, reports, and dashboards are hosted. Management, sharing, and collaboration take place in the cloud.
Power BI data gateway
Power BI Data Gateway is the bridge between Power BI and local data sources such as DirectQuery, Import, and Live Query. It is installed by Bl Admin.
Power BI report server
It can host paginated reports, KPIs, mobile accounts, and Power Bl Desktop reports. It is revamped every 4 months and installed/maintained by the IT team. Users can edit Power Bl reports and other reports created by the development team.
Power BI mobile app
The Power BI mobile app is obtainable for iOS, Android, and Windows. It can be managed using Microsoft Intune. This tool can display reports and dashboards on the Power Bl Service server.
Benefits of Power BI
Availability:
A significant advantage of using Power BI is that it is inexpensive compared to other cloud service providers. The Power BI Desktop version is free. You can download reports and start creating them on your computer. However, if you want to share your words in the cloud, you must pay $9.99 per user per month.
Excel integration:
You can also save data to Excel in Power BI. No issue how great the data is presented with charts, maps, and graphs using data visualization tools, people still tend to have data in their excel sheets. For example, you can get production unit data for the last six months in a few clicks from Power BI.
Custom visualization:
Power BI offers a broad range of custom visualizations where developers can take your requirements and translate them into KPIs, graphs, charts, maps, etc.
Data accessibility and interactive visualization:
Power BI provides superior access to all the data sources and datasets you create when designing reports in a centralized location. You can access data anytime, anywhere, and from any device multiple times. Users can interact with simple clicks with dashboards, filters, highlighting functions, etc.
Newly developed features:
One of the other benefits is that Microsoft provides users with monthly updates. Overall, Power BI is a fantastic tool for data analysis and visualization. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of Power BI.
Disadvantages of Power BI
Fixed patterns and large volumes of data:
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DAX is the most used language in Power BI. However, only so many actions can be performed using a DAX Formula. It may allow you to create many custom calculations, but it is not flexible, and the query becomes cumbersome. The result may not always be good for the performance or speed of the dashboard.
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Power BI has a limitation on the size of data it can process. If you want to import data more significant than 2 GB, you need to upgrade your free version to a paid version. And using Power BI can be hectic at times because it can fail to process large datasets with complex measures.
Relations to the table:
Another disadvantage is that Power BI can have difficulty handling data with complex relationships between tables. You must carefully create data models with unique fields so Power BI can distinguish the relationship with the corresponding table.
The user interface:
Power BI has a cramped and unwieldy interface full of icon options that block the display of reports and dashboards. Additionally, Tooltip has limited application in Power BI.
Compatibility with IOS:
Power BI does not feed a compatible option in the desktop version for Mac users.
Limitations in Excel integration:
While Excel integration is a plus of Power BI, you can only download data up to 150,000 rows.
Power BI certification
Certification will add a stamp of excellence to your portfolio in a specific technology. It shows that you have invested significant time and effort into learning a technology or skill set and have fully utilized it.
Additionally, certifications will help you achieve a substantial salary increase compared to a non-certified candidate. You can expect a 30-70 percent increase in your income if certified in a specific technology such as Business Intelligence. Below are some Power BI certifications that will help you move up in your career:
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DA-100 Exam: Microsoft conducts the DA-100 exam for data analysis with Microsoft Power BI certification but does not deliver any training course to be ready for the exam. To pass the exam, you are expected to have a thorough knowledge of the basics of Power BI, its components, and how to connect data from different sources and visualize and run queries on other datasets.
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Exam 70-778: Examine and Visualize Data with Microsoft Power BI. Exam 70-778 equip you to create custom visualizations using Power BI Desktop, configure desktops, and deploy models to Power BI web applications using Power BI.
Conclusion
Power BI provides tools and services that make Business Analytics a relatively easy task. A non-technical user can perform complex analyses and create interactive dashboards and live reports to visualize any information.
As Microsoft is the global leader in cloud AI services, Power BI allows users to integrate with other services and Cortana to get real-time analytics through queries.
