What is Microsoft Power BI?

Power BI is an analytics solution that delivers business intelligence and interactive visualizations to enable quick and informed decisions. It is a collection of technologies, comprised of software and hardware, that pull unrelated data sources together—whether they come from an Excel spreadsheet or warehouses on-premises or in the cloud—and turns them into interactive, visually stunning and coherent reports. It helps your organization make sense of your mountains of data to discover important trends and insights.

Power BI offers data preparation, visual-based data discovery, interactive dashboards, and augmented analytics in one product. It is available as an on-premises solution through Power BI Report Server or as a SaaS option through Azure cloud.

Power BI allows you to:

• Transform data into stunning, shareable visuals.
• Explore and analyze data from on-premises warehouses or the cloud, all in one view.
• Run and edit interactive reports from customized dashboards.
• Scale with ease with built-in security and data governance.

Various Power BI Products:

Power BI consists of:

• Power BI Desktop – This SaaS application lets you connect to, transform, and visualize data from multiple sources. This is a free resource that allows you to create dazzling reports.
• Power BI Pro – Power BI Pro is an individual user license that allows users to read and interact with reports and dashboards other users have published in the Power BI service, and to share content and collaborate with other Power BI Pro users.
• Power BI Premium – This capacity-based solution is ideal for enterprises, as it allows you to push reports broadly across your organization and scale as needed without needing individual licenses.
• Power BI Mobile – The best of Power BI, including the reporting functionality of desktop and the report server, is available in Android, iOS, and Windows 10 applications to keep you connected to your data on the go.
• Power BI Embedded – This is a PaaS service through Azure that allows you to embed reports and dashboards both for internal users and customers.
• Power BI Report Server – This is an on-premises report server with a web portal that allows you to display and manage reports and KPIs. It also comes with the tools to create Power BI reports, paginated reports, mobile reports, and KPIs. Your users can access those reports in a web browser, on a mobile device, or via email.

Power BI Features

Content Packs: Content packs provide a way to share reports, datasets, and dashboards with individuals across your organization. Permissions can easily be set for the content pack based on individual users or larger groups.

Natural Language Q&A: This powerful language recognition engine allows users to ask questions using conversational phrases and questions.

Custom Visualization: Power BI provides a library of custom visuals so that you can create the perfect look for your business needs.

Get Data from Anywhere: Businesses can get data from virtually anywhere with Power BI. The Desktop product includes a huge variety of on-premise and cloud data sources.

DAX Data Analysis Function: Power BI uses DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), which is a formula language with incredible capabilities that performs computational wonders to create powerful analytical data models.

Business Benefits of Power BI:

Why choose Power BI?

Power BI offers data preparation, visual-based data discovery, interactive dashboards and augmented analytics in a single product. Power BI is your holy grail which provides a seamless platform that draws on existing assets but also has emerging best-of-breed capabilities with the following business advantages:

Trust – For 12 consecutive years, Gartner has named Microsoft as a Magic Quadrant Leader among analytics and business intelligence platforms.

Security – Power BI gives you the ability to block risky user activity, apply sensitivity labels, implement protection and governance policies across your organization, and better meet regulatory requirements.

Affordability – Power BI Pro is available for a low monthly price per use, and Power BI Desktop is free to use. This pricing model allows you to offer everyone at your organization analytics capabilities without hurting your bottom line.

Innovation – Receive weekly and monthly updates that improve features and capabilities.

Simplicity – Power BI offers a single platform for both your self-service and enterprise data analytics needs.

Intelligence – Utilize the latest advances in Microsoft AI to help non-data team members build machine learning models, find insights, and prepare data quickly and easily.

Integrations – Easily connect Excel queries, data models, and reports to Power BI Dashboards, helping ot quickly share business data in new ways.

Action – Turn insights into action by combining Power BI with Power Apps and Power Automate to easily automate workflows and build applications.

Power BI visualizations

Visualize any data any way with Power BI’s vast library of fully customizable, open-source data visualizations. Using the custom SDK, you can create beautiful visuals based on JavaScript libraries such as D3, jQuery, and R-language scripts. These visual can be shared within your organization, delivered to customers, or shared on AppSource.

Some Power BI Visuals Include:

BAR/COLUMN CHART

Bar and column charts are good for showing measurable values in a quick and direct way.

PIE CHART

Pie charts are preferable when the user would like to see the percentage of a measurable vale in different categories.

LINE CHART

Line charts are good for showing how a value changes over time.

PLAY AXIS (SCATTER CHART)

Play axis charts are good when you are trying to show the relationship between two measurable values e.g. profit & cost), that may or may not be linearly related, over time.

MAPS

Self Service Power BI

As more organizations embrace a data culture to drive business decisions, there is a need for intuitive data tools to allow vast quantities of data to be leveraged. Power BI has several capabilities that allow business analysts to access and utilize data more easily and effectively.

There are several self-service features in Power BI that benefit organizations of all sizes:

• Self-Service Prep for Big Data: Analysts can ingest, transform, integrate, and enrich big data directly in the Power BI web service using Power Query. This data can be shared across multiple reports & dashboards.
• Advanced Analytics with AI & Azure: Data from Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 can be accessed at the same time, allowing for collaboration across roles. Business analysts and data engineers can take advantage of the benefits of each platform with seamless user experience.
• Enterprise-scale BI Models & ALM: The advanced capabilities of SQL Server Analysis Services are available in Power BI, enabling larger data volumes, lifecycle management, and third-party BI tool connectivity.
• Enterprise Reporting: Power BI includes popular SQL reporting services technology, which creates a unified and secure enterprise-wide reporting platform which is accessible across devices.
• Multi-Geo Compliance: Power BI Premium can be deployed in specific global regions so that organizations can meet data residency requirements and improve quality assurance by keeping the data close to its source.

Customer Experience with Power BI

Power BI empowers organizations to create a seamless and highly personalized customer experience, which not only increases customer satisfaction but also leads to enhanced customer loyalty, longer customer lifecycles, and improved ROI.  If harnessed properly, the vast amount of customer data that is available to today’s businesses allows them to provide personalized products, services, and experiences.

Power BI contributes to a superior customer experience by providing the following insights:

Customer Data at Your Fingertips – Power BI pulls data from external and internal sources to provide deep insight into the demographics, preferences, and behavior of your customers. New data is added and aggregated as it comes in, creating a rich history that you can draw upon and analyze when predicting future customer trends.

Customer Segmentation – Segment customers into groups by region, performance, or sales and group them by profitability. Segmenting customers allows you to identify possibilities for upselling and cross-selling and target your messaging more effectively.

Singular Customer Experience – Offer real-time, personalized communication to our customers in the form of tailor-made ads and coupons based on their past buying behavior.

Better KPIs – Power BI helps you define and track the KPIs most important to your organization, such as customer satisfaction, conversion rate, time in queue, etc.