Power BI – Features, Benefits, and More

Introduction

Microsoft’s gift for the data scientists, Power BI is one of the most sought-after BI tools to reach data-driven decisions. A favourite among data science tools, the tool stands out for its seamless scalability, convenient data integration, and advanced AI features. Power BI allows users to garner business insights from both cloud and on-premise data. It also provides the users with the ability to visualise and easily interpret large sets of data through its highly interactive dashboard. Put simply, your data science tool kit is incomplete without Power BI. The blog below offers a detailed overview on the major aspects of the leading Business Intelligence tool.

Key features of Power BI

• Multiple sources for data gathering

Microsoft Power BI supports different data sources including CSV, Web files, SQL, and Excel for interactive visualization.


• Easy Data connectivity

Power BI has various source connectivity that helps to derive data from the API, gather data from SQL server, and pick flat files.


• Data visualisation

Power BI helps in the easy portrayal of data through different viualisation tools.


• Filtration

Users can apply necessary filters within the power query which can filter the visual and data page.


• Power BI desktop

This is a free interactive software that helps to create exceptional reporting. The user doesn’t need advanced technical know-how or designing skills to operate the tool


• Stream analytics

Power BI offers real-time stream analytics that helps to fetch data from various social media portals for real-time analytics.

Visualisations available in Power BI framework

Power BI enables multiple forms of data visualisation to facilitate an interactive form of communication. The visualisation technique in Power BI can be categorised into the following:

• Donut and pie

Pie or donut charts help in creating variable proportions.


• Gauge and KPI cards

Key performance indicator helps in evaluating the track of progress in correspondence with expected business goals.


• Column and bars

Columns and bars are a great visualisation tool to explain growth data. Power BI has the capability of adding legends to understand the proportions.


• Ribbon and line

The time and date graph helps in understanding the previous as well as current patterns.

Power BI Architecture

The Power BI architecture includes the following 3 major steps:

• The first stage of data integration commences with data collection from various sources. Once collected, the gathered data is structured in one common format.
• The second stage follows up with data refining to remove redundant data and extract only the most valuable part.
• In the third stage, the final data is released so that the users can view it from reports and dashboards.

Components of Power BI

• Reports
The aggregated data in the report represents the profit in terms of product category, marketing cost, and sales in different countries.

• Datasets
The gathered data is used for developing visualizations in Oracle, SQL server tables, and Excel sheets.

• Visualisations
Power BI helps to represent data in a visual format such as treemaps, Pie charts and Line Graphs.

• Tiles
The bar diagram in the dashboard or the report provides single visualisation.

• Dashboards
On the contrary, the dashboard shows multiple visualisations in one single interface.

How does Power BI work?

The dashboards and the reports in Power BI work by developing a connection between the different sources of data and which can be displayed on the dashboard so that the users can view it. The data which is pulled from cloud sources such as CRM and Salesforce can be refreshed automatically.

Benefits of using Power BI

• Data integration

Power BI helps users to integrate the data from sources like cloud based platforms like Slaesforce and Azure, SQL server and Excel.


• User-friendly interface

With Power BI you can easily convert raw data in to user friendly insights


• Real-time data processing

Power BI assists in real time processing of data that users can update in reports and dashboards.


• Easy Collaboration

Allows users in sharing reports and dashboards so that they can make projects on data analysis easily.


• Customisable dashboards

Users are able to create customized reports and dashboards so that they can display it in a meaningful manner.

Popular competitors of Power BI

Some of the popular data science tools that compete with Power BI are as follows:

• Tableau
• Looker
• Sisense
• Qlik Sense
• Domo
• Posit
• MicroStrategy
• SAP Analytics Cloud
• Salesforce CRM Analytics
• TIBCO Spotfire

Conclusion

Organisations around the world are counting on Power BI to make data-driven decisions. If you are aspiring to build a career in data science or analytics, you should master Power BI or similar data science tools. If you are looking for a credible data science certification course, you can sign up with DataSpace Academy. The academy offers theoretical and practical training and internship and placement assistance.