Microsoft Power BI – Everything You Wanted to Know

With the data volumes increasing at skyrocketing speed, more data has been generated within the last couple of years than in the entire human history so far. Analyzing this data to derive useful business insights is not only crucial but also challenging for today’s businesses. According to statistics, 99.5% of the gathered data is never used or analyzed, defeating its purpose and wasting the efforts, time, cost and potential associated with its collection and future use. For this reason, most of the businesses have started embracing business intelligence systems to make purposeful and efficient use of data by converting it into information and valuable insights.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Power BI, one of the 3 elements of Microsoft Power Platform, is the collective name for a group of software services, apps, and connectors. It helps businesses collate, manage, and analyze data from heterogeneous data sources including Excel spreadsheets and a collection of on-premises or cloud-based hybrid data warehouses through a user-friendly interface. Power BI processes the data by pulling it together and transforming it into visually compelling and intelligible insights in the form of easy-to-process charts and graphs. With Power BI’s in-memory, super-fast engine, you can mash up data based on your business needs to model it, add calculated columns or create a star schema by yourself. You can further share these insights and KPIs across the organization or embed it in a business app or website through the Power BI dashboard.

What Does Power BI Do?

Microsoft Power BI is a self-service Analytics tool with innovative competencies. Some of its capabilities that make it one of the increasingly popular BI tools are

• Hybrid deployment supportMicrosoft BI can connect to different data sources and create data subsets using Quick Insights to allow the automatic application of analytics to data.
• Seamless integration with existing applicationsPower BI helps your business adopt analytics and reporting capabilities easily by seamlessly integrating with your business environment.
• The common data modelThe common data model lets you use extensible data construction during the app and report development.
• Power QueryPower BI lets businesses integrate and transform data into the Power BI web services using Power Query. It facilitates you to share this information across multiple models and users for enhanced Data Visualization.
• Complex data modelsThe tool supports complex data models that can be divided into separate diagrams using the modeling view. Based on your business needs, you can set, view or modify the common properties of the data model.
• Secured publishing of reportsPower BI keeps your users abreast of the latest information by letting you set up automatic data refresh and report publishing.
• Immersive personalized dashboardsThe tool lets you customize your information dashboard according to your business needs and ensures unified user experience through dashboards and BI reports that can be easily embedded in the application through APIs.
• Rapid and accurate business intelligenceIt helps enterprises transform data into rich visuals quickly and easily to derive valuable insights and make better business decisions.
• Eliminates need for specialized technical supportWith its intuitive graphical designer tools and powerful natural language interface support, Power BI eliminates the need for specialized technical support. Further, the tool is built on the foundation of Microsoft Excel and anyone comfortable using Excel can use Power BI.
• No speed and memory constraintsBeing a Cloud-based analytics tool, Power BI embedded eliminates the speed and memory constraints of a system and enables quick data retrieval and analysis.
• Supports advanced data servicesMicrosoft Power BI consulting tool has the integration capability with advanced Cloud services including Cortana or Bot framework that can respond to the verbal data query using natural language.
• Balanced performance and simplicityPower BI offers businesses the best from both worlds by providing them with the perfect balance between performance and simplicity. While it keeps it simple to create formulae using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), it offers high operational speed and faster query response times with in-memory analytics.

Microsoft Power BI Components

Can Power BI be Customized to Your Business Needs?

Like all other Microsoft Platform products, Power BI is highly customizable. Not only it can be connected to a broad range of data sources to pull the data, but also, it has its rich library of fully customizable and open-source data visualizations. You can create, test, and debug stunning visualizations on the fly with custom visual SDK that is based on Java-script libraries, jQuery and R-language scripts. You can further package them into redistributable custom visuals to share across your organization, your customers or even to the outside world on AppSource.

WaferWire Cloud Technologies helps businesses unleash the power of Power BI through its quality Power BI Consulting Services. Our Power BI experts can help you enhance your business productivity and efficiency with easy to use and highly functional dashboards and reports specific to your business needs. To know more, contact us today.