It has become more and more important to be able to visualise your data and present it in a more comprehensible manner to your audience. A good-looking representation of data goes a long way in making sure that it is accepted. Hence data visualization and representation of data is important not just to data scientists and statisticians but even to non-technical roles who can use data visuals to meet business objectives.
For this reason, Microsoft’s cloud-based Business Intelligence service, Power BI has been gaining popularity. The Power BI is a free service that helps organise data into meaningful visuals. It allows anyone to visualise, analyse and transform an organisation’s data. It is very simple and very user friendly and there are a lot of Power BI courses available. It helps convert data from different sources into amazing visuals offering a real time view of the business which can be easily understood by the users. There are many other similar products offering similar solutions but let’s look at why Power BI Visual stands out amongst all of them.
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It’s free
Power BI is free to download and use but the free version comes with a 1 GB cap. However, it is perfect for a small organisation and even though there are restrictions, it offers them extremely powerful capabilities to build reports and dashboards, connect to data, manipulate data, schedule data refreshes, share dashboards, view other user’s dashboards and view data on mobile devices.
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It’s available for Desktops
The Power BI Desktop can be downloaded and installed on your computer and after installation you will be able to immediately start working on it. It will enable you to connect various data sources on your PC, manipulate it using the many features available on it and start building reports based on it.
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It’s also available on your Mobile devices
Power BI has amazing connectivity and allows you to access your reports on the go on all your mobile devices. The Power BI app is available on both Android and iOS and can be downloaded for free from respective app stores.
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Drag and drop to create amazing visualizations
Drag and drop has become the epitome of simplicity and that’s exactly what you can do in Power BI. You can get started right away by simply connecting to the data sources and then simply drag and drop fields from those sources to create brilliant looking reports by using the many chart options available, use existing reports and modify them or build your own to suit your needs.
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Sharing is easy
After building your report, you can email it to anyone from your organisation and provide them the latest view of the report. You can continue to build on your report or modify the data without having to send them another email with the updates.
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Data Refresh
The Power BI allows you to schedule data refresh so that you no longer have to do it manually. Once set, it will periodically update the data and potentially allow you to save a lot of time and effort.
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Queries
The best feature according to many, this handy feature will allow you to go into your dashboard and type out a query to get an answer generated by Power BI. The answer can also be in the form of a visualization you need. You can also pin the result to your dashboard so that you can see it every time you log into the application.
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Dashboard
Dashboard is essentially where you will be working at. It will have multiple results pinned on it and allow users to see all the relevant data once they log into Power BI. It can also automatically detect relationships between data and once it has been related, redraw the chart to reflect a much more filtered view.
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Content Packs
Power BI comes with a lot of pre-built dashboards and results, called Content packs, and can be used in connecting to data from different systems (Google, Salesforce et al.) It can be simply downloaded and installed from the Content Packs section in Power BI. Once you have logged onto Power BI and confirmed your credentials, it will immediately begin building pre-configured reports and dashboards. Quite handy, don’t you think?
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Multiple sources, one application
Power BI allows users to collect data from a wide variety of data sources and connect to them, build meaningful relationships between them and transform them into attractive and interactive reports that can be shared with the whole team.
Still wondering if you can use it and how it might be beneficial for your organisation? Sign up for a Microsoft Power BI training today!