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What is Power BI?
Power BI is a Microsoft Proprietary Business Intelligence software, primarily used to visualize data. It is essentially a tool composed of different software, connectors and apps, to help businesses transform data into meaningful insights. It enables the users to connect their data from a variety of data sources, provide data cleaning capabilities, enables to perform arithmetic, logical and statistical calculations, provide data-modelling capabilities, and offer a variety of visuals to display their data graphically.
Power BI is designed to be used by professionals of diverse roles having varying levels of technical and business knowledge. For instance, a BI developer or a team of BI developers, develops comprehensive ‘Departmental Dashboards’ i.e. Sales, Finance, HR etc. and also an extensive Executive dashboard for the Top Management. The departmental dashboards can be filtered for different users as well. The users in this case can be an ‘Admin’, a ‘Contributor’, a ‘Participant’ or just a ‘viewer’.
Components of Power BI
Power BI is composed of many different integrated applications. The three main elements of Power BI are:
- Power BI Desktop: This is the windows desktop application that is installed and run on user’s desktop.
- Power BI service: It is a Software as a Service(SaaS) service of Power BI that helps teams to collaborate and share reports online.
- Power BI Mobile: The mobile app for Windows, Android and iOS.
However, the three elements have further two more elements:
- Power BI report Server; this is a report server for publishing reports on-premises.
- Power BI Report Builder; this tool helps in developing reports that can be perfectly displaced on pages for printing.
Furthermore the paid subscription version adds more analytical features. The Pro and the Premium are the two most subscribed paid versions.
Purpose of using Power Bi
As more and more businesses are moving towards a data-driven decision making environment, professionals find it challenging to make sense of their data. So, like any Business Intelligence tool, Power BI enables a user to visualize their data into meaningful insight. This helps a business make more sound decisions.
The most common functionalities of Power BI are;
- to connect data sources
- to develop data-models
- to perform arithmetic, logical and/or statistical calculations
- to create visuals to represent KPIs, Metrics and comprehensive Reports
- to enable users to collaborate in developing and consuming reports
Power BI users?
Although Power BI reports are developed by data professionals having the technical knowledge of Power BI, DAX(Data Analysis Expression) language, M(Mashup) language and data in general, however, the use of Power BI is not limited to them. Power BI is used by professional across varying field have almost no technical knowledge. This is because Power BI is a user-friendly Drag-and-Drop application, requiring almost no coding for consuming the records.
Any professional who needs to make data-driven decisions can use Power BI. This includes:
- Business Intelligence Analysts,
- Financial Analysts,
- HR Analysts
Power BI within Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft has a new offering called Microsoft Fabric, which is essentially a single source for data as well as services. This enables users to perform analytics to multiple sources of data at the same time. The prime example of Microsoft Fabric is Power BI, where OneLake represents the data and Power BI represents the service. In fact the administration of Power BI is now handled by the Microsoft Fabric but the functionality remain the same for Power BI Desktop as well as the Power BI Service. Large organizations find it very helpful; to be able to store data and perform analytics at the same.
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