Microsoft Power BI: A tool for data visualization

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a low-code tool for gathering, accessing, cleaning, and visualizing data. Power BI is a set of software services, apps, and connectors that combine to transform various types of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.

This data could be in an excel sheet or an on-premises data warehouse.

Types of Power BI

There are three basic types of Power BI tools, namely:

Power BI family tree
Power BI family tree

Power BI desktop

This free windows software lets you connect, transform data, make interactive visuals, and create dashboards. On the Power BI desktop, we can only create content on our workspace and cannot share or publish with other workspaces without a Power BI pro license.

Despite the desktop application being free, it has multiple features and functionalities that help solve problems and make data-driven decisions, like the ability to connect to and import data from more than 70 clouds and/or on-premise sources. It has the same visuals as Power BI Pro and others.

Power BI service

This is the Software as a Service (Saas) part of Power BI, also known as the Power BI online. It is a component that allows users to access and interact with their Power BI reports, create and edit dashboards, and create new visualizations using the self-service functions. Users can share the findings and collaborate with coworkers on reports and dashboards.

Power BI mobile

We connect to and interact with our cloud and on-premises data through mobile apps. Power BI Desktop is where we create reports. In the Power BI report service, we can create dashboards and view dashboards and reports.

These reports and dashboards are accessible through the Power BI mobile apps, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Uses of Power BI

Power BI can be used for a wide range of things. Let's take a look at some things that Power BI is used for:

  • Gather/connect to data: Power BI connects to a series of data sources and warehouses like Excel, SQL server, CSV/text file, and many more to load data into its Power Query ‘KitchenThis is the Power Query Editor where data can be transformed and cleaned before visualization.’ before cleaning.

  • Transform and clean data before visualizing: When data has been loaded into Power BI for transformation, it is then moved to Power Query Editor where it is cleaned and wrangled before visualization and insight gathering.

  • Create visual representations: After wrangling the said data using Power Query, also referred to as the power kitchen, the analyst can then create visuals like graphs, charts, scorecards, slicers, etc. They can do so to tell a visual story of the data provided to gather insights and provide data-driven solutions to the problem at hand.

  • Create reports that are visual collections on one or more report pages: In creating visuals for proffering data-driven solutions, it is important to have different visuals on different report pages to have unique insights gathered directly from each to drive actionable insights.

  • Use the Power BI service to share reports with others: The Power BI service is an online component of the Power BI family that makes it possible for users to view data, visuals, reports, and dashboards from any location and device. Projects and workspaces can also be shared and collaborated individually with users.

Features of Power BI

  • A variety of appealing visualizations: Power BI has a massive range of beautiful visualizations that include slicers, columns, stacked charts, doughnut charts, pie charts, histograms, etc.

  • A wide range of data sources and connectors: Power BI lets us select our data from different and numerous data sources. For example, data can be connected to Power BI from a PDF, SQL server, excel, oracle, text, JSON files, URL, etc.

  • Dax functionality: Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) can be found in Power BI. These analysis functions are predefined codes that perform analytics-specific data functions. The Power BI function library currently contains around 200 functions. The creators are constantly adding new ones.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Power BI is an amazing analytics and business intelligence tool. It can be used to help businesses make decisions based on insights from a dataset to answer the specific questions that are being asked of it.

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