Power BI is a technological tool developed by Microsoft to facilitate the sorting of data from an otherwise chaotic data set. This technology takes raw data and combines business analytics and data visualization to present information on which action can be taken. Power BI enjoys great popularity due to features such as an interactive user interface (UI/UX), the ability to integrate real-time analytics into Excel software, etc. Power BI is a useful business tool that allows you to connect different data sets, create charts and graphs for data visualization, and share data insights within the organization, among other things. Compared to other business intelligence tools, Power BI is relatively easy to learn.
What is Power BI and How do I use it in Daily life?
Power BI is a Business Intelligence tool and these tools, in general, will help you, as a business, to take an unorganized dataset and derive meaningful insights like trends and patterns out of it, you can use this to make a business strategy or a tactical business decision. Imagine you own a fashion label that runs advertisements on several social media platforms, Power BI can help you create a dashboard that can help you track the performance of your ads and act accordingly.
Power BI is an important tool for Business Analysts as they have to sift through data and find actionable information that can benefit a business. In the era of Big Data, Power BI has several uses in daily life I used maps to visualize data on income per capita for different countries in Asia, and the data for that can be pulled from the web as Power BI lets you do that. I can make a pie chart for my monthly spending, a bar chart visualizing the monthly/yearly profits of my business and I can also draw a line graph to count my daily calorie intake when I am on a diet, etc.
Why Power BI is important?
Who doesn’t like Reports or organized data? Well, I most certainly do and what is even better is a creative data visualization. I knew of Excel sheets where I could store data, but it was boring to look at and hardly made any sense to someone as uninterested as me where numbers and tables are concerned, and I am no spreadsheet expert either. Business Intelligence tools are made for situations like these but let’s face it, not a lot of them offer self-service and those that do will still need to be monitored if you are a novice like me, but you want to make a report of your own. Microsoft came up with Power BI in 2011 and it is a great business intelligence tool that I happened to discover in my search for achieving autonomy in report making. It’s easy to learn due to its user-friendly interface, a few tutorials from the internet and you are good to go.
Power BI makes it easy to gather data from different places, such as Excel, SQL databases, and the web. For example, say you have a spreadsheet with your menstrual cup sales by country in Excel, and you find data on the female population by country online. With Power BI, you can bring both sets of data together and create a dashboard without needing to do any calculations yourself. So, you could make a bar graph showing your sales compared to the female population of each country, sorted from highest to lowest or vice versa.
Power BI is valuable because it lets anyone create their own reports without relying on others. This means you don’t have to keep going back and forth between people who know the data and those who can make reports. You can easily share your data across different devices and platforms with customized security settings, and it’s free to download. Plus, you don’t need to be a specialist or know how to code to use Power BI. It gives you the freedom to make your own reports. And if you need to change your reports quickly to fit the audience, Power BI offers lots of creative ways to visualize data, not just the usual tables.
How to get started with BI | Learning Path
The user interface of Power BI isn’t very intimidating and if you tinker around enough you can make it work for you because the procedure is very simple, you take a pre-existing data set be it from Excel, Web, or anywhere else and then you upload it on Power BI, it also gives you an option to transform the data if you don’t like the state of your raw data. After the data import, it goes to a blank canvas where visuals for data can be inserted, you can go fields pane to select the data that you want to insert and the visualizations pane to control how your data is visualized. You don’t have to do the mathematics behind the data analysis or establish relations between different visuals in the canvas, the Power BI will do it for you. It doesn’t take a lot of time to learn the basics of Power BI but to speed up the process you can peruse tutorials available on the internet and you will be good to go.
However, to be a good Power BI developer there are some things that one needs to learn and some topics that need to be studied for proper knowledge. The starting topics will differ based on what you decide to do with Power BI, those who want to approach it as a Developer should look into MS and Azure certifications, and those who are approaching it for business, need to look into Dashboard Creation and Data Visualization aspects of it. To build on your Power BI Developer skills one can consider the Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate Certification offered by Microsoft. Power BI is less about how technologically sound you are and more about your requirements gathering and scope control skills. Other useful skills include Python and R for handling complex data sets, but focusing on SQL, DAX, and M Query is a good starting point and sufficient for many tasks.
Becoming a Power BI expert isn’t just about studying – it’s about getting hands-on experience with the tool. You learn by using it for different tasks and pushing its boundaries. Not all practice is equal though – working with larger data sets helps you understand how the Vertipaq engine works. Practice what you’ve learned, like SQL and DAX, and get familiar with concepts like filter context and context transition. I focused on optimizing models, following best practices, and creating solid models, which is crucial for a great Power BI presentation. This hands-on practice not only improved my skills but also beefed up my resume, deepened my understanding of data, and made me more efficient.
How to use Power BI for Business Analytics and How Businesses Use Power BI?
Business Analytics relies on Power BI because it’s all about turning raw data into useful insights, like spotting trends and patterns that can benefit businesses. Tools like Power BI are essential for this task because they help visualize data creatively, making it easier for non-experts to understand. Power BI gathers data from different sources, merges it, and then presents it in customizable dashboards. Businesses use Power BI to connect their data, share it across platforms, set custom security settings, and create visually appealing dashboards that can be updated whenever needed.
Advantages of Power BI:
- Its infographics can be accessed across devices and platforms.
- It can be used to link data from various sources even the web.
- It supports R which combines complex graphics and statistical computing making it useful for advanced data specialists.
- It is an improvement on MS Excel because it can operate on larger datasets and provides more creative options to visualize data.
Disadvantages of Power BI:
- Power BI uses DAX language, and it has limitations when it comes to formulas.
- The free version of Power BI can only ingest up to 2 GB of data.
- Not more than 150,000 rows of data can be imported from Excel to Power BI.
- Power BI isn’t able to fully deal with tables that have complex relationships within them.
- Power BI is incompatible with MacOS.
Best Tips and Tricks to Make the Most of Power BI
Power BI is a cutting-edge Business Intelligence tool that can help you exercise greater autonomy over your data and create personalized reports. Although Power BI is easy to learn due to its user-friendly interface there are some Power BI tips and tricks that its long-time users have come up with to make the most of Power BI and they are listed below:
- Keep the Reports Clean: Power BI offers several options for data visualization but it’s not productive to use everything in one single dashboard. It clutters the presentation and increases the loading time of the dashboard. An ideal dashboard would have anywhere between three to five visuals and a couple of KPI cards and gauges.
- Keep the Report Accessible and Inclusive: Power BI offers the option of sharing the work across devices like Desktops and Mobiles and platforms like Excel. This makes the report accessible and inclusive.
- Using the right kind of visuals: Some visuals work better for a particular data type and will fall flat for other data types. For comparing proportional sizes, try pie or donut charts; For comparing differences among values, try a column or bar chart; For visualization of changing values, try a line or area chart but a waterfall chart would be better in highlighting the exact cause of change; For time-based categories, a timeline or time series chart can be used; For intricate hierarchies or complex inter-relationships, try a network chart.
- Query Optimization: having too many or unnecessary queries or visuals on your dashboard will slow down the loading which is why it is important to optimize your final presentation and be merciless with dropping anything non-essential. Power BI Performance Analyzer is one tool that can find out the impact each query has on the performance, and you can then delete whatever is causing the delay.
- Avoid unnecessary rows and columns: Power BI will load the entire table from the raw dataset into your device’s memory and the bigger the table, the longer it will take to load. If you can’t delete the unused data columns from an original data source, then maybe create a summary table and then import it to Power BI.
- Organising Dataset: If your dataset has hundreds of fields then they can be neatly categorized into Folders so that the final presentation looks organized. You can do that by going to Model View on the left sidebar of the screen, the field that you want to be categorized by clicking left on it will open the properties pane where you can enter the name of the folder that you want to create in the Display Folder field. Now that a Display Folder has been created simply drag and drop other fields that you want to keep in that folder/category.
- Interactions: Power BI has this default feature where two visuals if they are related will interact with each other. For Example, you run a candy company that ships to five different cities and produces eight different candies. Now, on your dashboard, you have a vertical bar graph to show sale volume by city and another horizontal bar graph to show sale volume by product. If you were to click on a single product on the horizontal bar graph, then the same will show the sale by volume of the same product in the vertical bar graph.
Conclusion
Humans are natural thinkers and tend to visualize everything from a small story to a big goal. But when it comes to large amounts of data, it’s quite difficult to visualize it all in that small brain. That’s why there are these powerful data visualization tools that allow us to visualize everything in a beautiful and structured way.
Power BI will definitely be one of the most sought-after visualization tools on the market in 2024 and in the near future. So try to really understand and build on the basics, after all, you want to become a successful data visualization specialist.
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