Power BI is a powerful data visualization tool that can be used to track business analytics, measure customer engagement, and more. Know about advantages and disadvantages of data visualization tool - the Power Bi.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a comprehensive and powerful business analytics tool provided by Microsoft that helps users analyze their data and create visualizations. Users can use these visuals to make decisions about their business.
By excelling at Excel data, analyzing data, presenting data, and improving data analytics, Power BI can make great strides in expanding your sales and marketing efforts.
With Power BI, you can easily create and share PowerPoint presentations, reports, cubes, visualizations, and more.
There are different versions of Power BI that are used for different platforms, such as desktop apps, apps as a service (SaaS), and Power BI mobile apps. It provides several software connectors and services for business intelligence. Power BI's cloud-based service is known as Power BI Services. Apart from this, the version with the desktop is called Power BI Desktop.
How does Power BI work?
Power BI works by using a dashboard interface to display data. You can then add filters, charts, maps, and tables to help you understand what's going on in your business. Once you've created your visualization, you can share it with others via email, social media, or even embed it directly on your website.
Power BI has a defined architecture that includes various important components that serve to use Power BI. It allows you to discover, connect, combine and refine data sources to meet your analysis needs. It can be downloaded as an add-in for Excel or used as part of Power BI Desktop. Below are the main components –
Power Query - it can be used to search, access, and transform public or internal data sources.
Power Pivot - it is used for data modeling for in-memory analysis.
Power View - it allows you to visualize, analyze and display data.
Power Map – it brings data to life with interactive geographic visualization.
Power BI – it lets you share data visualizations and workbooks that you can update from on-premises and cloud data sources.
Power BI Q&A – it lets you ask questions and get instant answers using a natural language query.
Data Management Gateway – it offers regular data updates, data feed display, table exposure.br />
Data Catalog – it allows the user to discover and reuse queries using a data catalog. Metadata can be facilitated for the search function.
Who uses Power BI?
PowerBI is mainly used by companies that want to monitor their performance over time. These companies may have sales teams, marketing departments, customer service representatives, or any number of employees who need access to real-time information.
Businesses use Power BI to gain insight into how they're doing and where they could improve. An example of a professional who uses Power BI for their work is a data scientist, database administrator, data analyst, IT manager, etc.
Power BI features - Why should you use Power BI?
Power Bi is a great way to start analyzing data. If you don't know where to start, you can simply start with a blank slate. Then, as you gain some experience, you'll be able to build your own dashboards and share them with colleagues.
Microsoft Power BI has a number of features that can be used to create powerful data visualizations. Among the most popular features is the ability to create cubes that allow users to organize their data hierarchically.
Additionally, reporting allows users to easily create stunning visualizations that show how different aspects of their data compare or contrast with each other. Finally, visuals can be shared with others via social media or email using the tools available in Power BI.
Power BI offers several features that make it unique from other BI platforms. These include -
- Custom visuals - Create your own charts, graphs, maps, and tables to visualize your data. You can use these visuals directly in your dashboard or embed them in documents, presentations, email messages, and websites.
- Interactive dashboards - Use interactive dashboards to engage your audience and get feedback from them. Your audience can interact with your dashboards by adding comments, voting, sorting, filtering, and drilling down to specific details.
- Data refresh - Get real-time updates about changes to your data. You can set alerts to notify you whenever new data arrives, or automatically update your dashboards based on the latest data.
- Share your dashboards - Publish your dashboards to the web or mobile devices. You can share your dashboards via social networks, e-mail, or even text messages.
- Mobile apps - Access your dashboards anywhere, anytime, on any device. You can view your dashboards on your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, or TV.
Uses for Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is most often used as a tool for creating stunning data visualizations. By creating beautiful visuals that show how different aspects of their data compare or contrast with each other, Power BI can be used in many ways to understand and analyze their information.
Plus, by sharing your amazing visualizations with others online or through social media, you can ensure that everyone has access to amazing information about their favorite industries or companies.
Benefits of Power BI for business: Tips for using Power BI more effectively
One of the most important aspects of using Microsoft Power BI is being able to use it effectively as an Excel data visualizer. By harnessing the power of Power BI, you can quickly and easily explore and analyze your data regarding your business. To get the most out of data visualization, use the following tips -
Use Power BI with Excel data
When you explore your data this way, you'll be able to see patterns and statistics that you wouldn't see with other tools. With Excel, you can make quick decisions by viewing all your data in one place, making it the ideal tool for data analysis and reporting.
Use Power BI to analyze data
By analyzing data with Power BI, you will be able to identify trends and relationships between different pieces of information in your business. This will help you make more informed decisions about how to handle your data or how to improve its clarity and accuracy to get growth in the business.
Use Power BI to present data
Presenting data in an effective way will help others clearly communicate its impact. You can use Power BI templates or charts to create presentations that are easy to understand and share with friends or family members. Additionally, by creating grids or viewports that allow easy manipulation of your data, you can create stunning visualizations to illustrate your findings regarding your business and services and are really only suitable for online consumption or presentation purposes!
Advantages of Power BI
Here are the benefits of using Power BI:
- It offers pre-built dashboards and reports for SaaS solutions
- It provides real-time dashboard updates.
- It is a secure and reliable connection to your data sources in the cloud or on-premise
- Power BI offers rapid deployment, hybrid configuration, and a secure environment.
- Data exploration using natural language query.
- Features for dashboard visualization
- New features are added frequently that are great for Excel users.
- Extensive Q&A database connection capabilities for web publishing.
- It provides integration with Python and R coding to use visualizations.
- Power Query provides many options related to data conflicts and cleaning.
- After publishing data to the Power BI web service, you can schedule an update without manual intervention.
- Power BI is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Disadvantages of Power BI
Here are the disadvantages of using Power BI:
- Dashboards and reports are shared only with users with the same email domains.
- Power Bl will not mix imported data from real-time connections.
- Power BI cannot accept a file size larger than 1 GB.
- It never receives or transmits user, account or other entity parameters.
- Very few data sources allow real-time connection to Power BI reports and dashboards.
- It does not have any native data visualizations. You need to use third-party tools to create visuals.
- There is no way to share reports directly with users. You can only send them via email.
- Power BI does not provide any offline capabilities. You cannot view reports even if an internet connection is unavailable.
- It does not allow you to customize report layouts.
- It does not offer any mobile apps.
- It does not support Excel workbooks.
- It does not integrate well with Office 365.
- It does not give you access to Microsoft Azure cloud services.
- It does not let you import data from external databases.
- It does not store data locally. All data is stored online.
- It does not run on Linux.
- It does not work with SQL Server 2016.
- It does not scale well.
- It does not perform well on older hardware.
FAQ - Frequently Asked Question
What is Power BI used for?
Power BI is a collection of software services and applications that are used to represent cloud storage, data warehouse, or Excel sheet-based unstructured and raw data in an attractive, productive, and interactive visualization.
Is Power BI the same as Excel?
Both are two different software used for data visualization. But Power BI is user friendly, very fast data handling and powerful tool as compared to Excel which stands out from its professional, attractive, interactive and customizable reporting dashboard.
Is Power BI and SQL same?
No, both are not the same. SQL is used as a data management and collection tool whereas Power BI is used to present the collected data in a productive and attractive customized visual for determining a business decision.
Is Power BI or tableau better?
Both the softwares are available with similar features but Tableau is quite expensive and offers more visualization options than Power Bi. Apart from this, Tableau handles and performs bulk data faster. Power Bi performs well for limited data volume.
Is SQL a coding language?
SQL full form is Structured Query Language. It is a programming language that is used to handle relational database.
What is power query and DAX?
The full form of DAX is Data Analysis Expressions. It is a type of formula language used in Power Pivot and Power Bi that uses different types of functions to handle data stored in tables. Power Query is used to query data sources, clean and retrieve data. You then use DAX to analyze the data in Power Pivot.
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