Power BI – as has been told probably many times before – is a game-changer.
Many people will tell you that Power BI is, quite simply, a visualization tool.
Power BI is the analytics tool that can help your business move up to the next level.
There are two distinctly different ways that you can access Power BI:
- http://PowerBI.com – a method that is accessable wherever there is an internet connection (and you have a browser capable of displaying all this goodness)
2. Power BI Dashboard – the application that a user can use to more easily create visualizations.
Given data – whether it be in a database, Excel spreadsheets, or even text files – either of these ways can help put your data into a more easily readable format. In other words, it can take your data from looking like this:
to
Your ever so humble writer doesn’t know about y’all, but I know which one I can use to give my business great insights.
Not only can I use PowerBI to determine how my business has been doing, but it can also be used to help predict trends.
Truly, the only thing stopping you from showing your data the way you need to is you. There are hundreds of potential visualizations that
have been created already. From the bar chart to a line chart to the ubiquitous pie chart, many of these visualization types are baked into
PowerBI directly “out of the box”, but there are so many more available via the PowerBI Marketplace.
There are many great places where you can find out more about PowerBI. Below are some of my favorites:
Guy in a Cube – everyone’s favorites Adam Saxton and Patrick Leblanc discuss PowerBI and making do what you need.
Get Started Building with PowerBI – Microsoft has put together some great courses and documentation to help get you up to speed with PowerBI.
So, hopefully, I’ve at least given you a bit of a taste of PowerBi. Now, next time, we’ll go into another product in the Power Platform – PowerApps…