When you build a business with a vision to build the best product, it becomes immensely difficult to follow through without knowing how it’s performing in real-time. If you don’t know the health of your business, how will you make a decision about it?
This is where business analytics and data visualization tools are of immense value.
Microsoft Power BI is the fastest-growing cloud business intelligence, data visualization and reporting software for small and large teams. Power BI is the most popular business intelligence and data visualization tool due to its report publication and distribution capabilities. Also, it is compatible with other Microsoft legacy products, so it is a good choice for all the companies already using Microsoft products.
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a report creation software that helps you visualize data in various metrics, analyze it and share insights within the team or across the company. The product has many versions which can be used to make important decisions for the business and ongoing projects.
The top reasons to use Power BI for business analytics
Power BI can be used to create interactive dashboards that consolidate key metrics or rich reports to connect data from workloads. It’s a powerful tool to interact with business data and pull it from a wide range of sources to enable data-driven decisions.
Power BI is an all-in-one software solution. Whether it’s data collection, preparation, discovering new trends to creating dashboards, reports, and visualizations. Its self-service capabilities make it an intuitive tool for interacting and turning data into insights. These are our top nine reasons to use Power BI for self-service analytics and data analytics.
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It is easy to link your data together
Power BI makes it easy to combine your data into one place for better accessibility, organization, and visibility in your reporting efforts.
The tool supports 70+ connectors which makes it simple to upload data from cloud websites such as OneDrive, DropBox Pricing, etc.
These connectors allow you to load pre-built Power BI dashboards within seconds. You can also perform powerful data analysis in minutes.
Power BI’s drag and drop interface makes it easy to use Power BI. Power BI can also combine multiple files (such as Excel spreadsheets) into one report that allows you to analyze and code the merged data.
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It is powerful and efficient
Power BI’s Power Pivot database modeling engine, which is shared with Excel, is a high-performing columnar database that uses modern tabular databases to compress tables and ensure full memory access for maximum performance.
Power BI Workbook (.PBIX) files can be much smaller than the original data sets. In fact, 1GB databases can often be compressed to 50 – 200MB.
Excel can slow down when working with large models by comparison, but Power BI is optimized to handle tables exceeding 100 million records quickly.
Power BI also automates incremental updates, ensuring that data is always current. This valuable advantage further simplifies visual reporting for users. Power BI compresses and loads millions upon millions of records to memory, allowing for faster data analysis and a more efficient user experience.
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It features custom, open-source visuals
Power BI includes a lot of pre-packaged standard data visuals that you can leverage in your interactive reports. These include a bar, column, and line, matrix, pie charts and scatter, table, waterfall, and scatter. Each of these visuals has its own customization options to enhance presentation and functionality.
For an extra touch, however, you can use free custom visuals that have been created by developers (or in the house) and shared with Power BI to show your data in a way that best tells your data story.
There are many rich and complex visuals available to you from Microsoft as well as the community at the AppSource Marketplace. These include bullet graphs and correlation plots, decision trees, heatmaps and sparklines.
Power BI allows you to make your data visuals that are unique and different from the standard. It is also very useful to see what other Power BI users are using to help you develop your design skills.
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Advanced data specialists can use its native R integration
Power BI’s strength lies in its simplicity. However, it can also be used by advanced data specialists. Its support for R, an Open-Source Programming Language (currently over 7,000 packages), is one way it does this.
R scripts combine complex graphics and statistical computing to perform data manipulation, machine learning, and statistical modeling. This includes data visualization. Power BI allows you to integrate these R visualizations into a standard dashboard.
Power BI can be used by itself to drill down into data and slice it to better reflect relationships, key metrics, hierarchies and hierarchies. However, native support for R scripts allows users to present advanced business analytics and shaping such as machine learning, predictive trends, smoothing, and smoothing.
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Excel’s familiar features allow you to perform more advanced analytics
Advanced Excel users who are proficient in Data Analysis Expressions can dig deeper into their data to find patterns with Power BI. Power BI features such as clustering, grouping, forecasting, and quick measures make it easier for them to use Power BI.
Excel users will be familiar with the embedded self-service Power Query tool, which makes it simple to ingest and transform business data, as well as integrate and enrich Power BI.
Another advantage of Power BI is its seamless integration with Excel. This eliminates the need to export data. Simply click on ‘Analyse Excel’ to see an identical interface to Excel. Power BI’s native integration with Excel is a great option if you have had difficulty getting users in your business to use a new tool.
Summary: Power BI’s powerful toolset is easy to learn for MS Excel users. This allows you to use existing organizational knowledge and get into Power BI quicker.
Conclusion
It is easy to see why Power BI is becoming more popular among businesses looking for rich reporting, interactive dashboards, and better insight. You can now take advantage of the many services and tools available to help you prepare for a successful Power BI implementation and improve data insight across your organization.
For more info about how Power BI data visualization capabilities can help your company make smarter decisions, contact Power BI consultants. We have built many data visualization solutions for marketing, sales, manufacturing and other departments of an enterprise.
