Power BI is a valuable Microsoft tool that provides business analytics services. It visualizes your data and shares insights. Subsequently, this tool converts the data from distinctive sources to create business intelligence reports and make interactive dashboards. It helps to build different charts and graphs to visualize the data.
Why should we use Power BI?
There are a plethora of reasons that the Power BI is an effective tool.
1. Access vast amounts of data from different sources:
Power BI can access vast volumes of data from distinctive sources. It lets you analyze, view, and understand the vast volume of data. Basically, the common sources of Power BI include Excel, CSV, XML, PDF, JSON, etc. It utilizes powerful compression algorithms in the PBIX file to cache and import the data.
2. Interactive UI/UX functionality:
Power BI manages and aligns all the data to make it visually appealing. The innovative feature of drag and drop allows the users to use it easily. Thus, it lets you copy all formatting across similar visualizations.
3. Excel Integration:
The tool allows you to collect, publish, and transfer the business data within the Excel sheet. If you are familiar with Office 365 then you can handle Excel queries, data models, and reports to Power BI Dashboards.
4. Accelerate the insights of vast data with Azure:
Utilizing Power BI with Azure can enhance the speed of analyzing and sharing huge amounts of data significantly. The feature of Azure data lake not only reduces the time to take insights instead it also increases collaboration between business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.
5. Insights to make actions:
Power BI helps you to get insights from data and make these insights into actions for data-driven business decisions.
6. Real-life stream analytics:
Power BI provides real-life stream analytics that lets you obtain data from different sensors and social media sources. Hence, it allows you to access real-time analytics to make business decisions anytime.
Features of Power BI:
There are various innovative features of Power BI that include:
· Power BI desktop software:
Power BI desktop is a free software that you can download and install on your device to make reports for easy access to data.
· Stream analytics:
Stream analytics is one of the main features of Power BI. Thus, it assists in real-time analytics to make timely decisions from factory sensors to social media sources.
· Multiple data sources:
The capability of supporting different data sources is a vital feature of Power BI. Consequently, data can be accessed from various sources that are Excel, SQL Server, CSV, Web files, etc. It helps significantly in providing interactive visualizations.
· Custom visualization:
While handling complex data, its default standard may not be sufficient for some scenarios. Hence, the custom library can prove as the best option for visualization that can align with your needs.
Advantages Of Power BI:
- Easy-to-use interface: It has an intuitive user interface to allow users to visualize and analyze data conveniently.
- Data integration: Power BI enables you to easily integrate the data from distinctive sources such as SQL Server, Excel, and cloud-based sources like Azure.
- Customizable reports: Users can customize the dashboards and reports to display the data in their preferred way.
- Real-time data: Consequently, the power BI provides real-time data processing that lets them maintain up-to-date data in the dashboards and reports.
- Collaboration: The tool enhances collaboration on data analyst projects easily. Hence, it lets users share their dashboards and reports.
Disadvantages of Power BI:
- Limited data processing capability: Power BI can handle heavy-duty processing of data but can sometimes cant work with large datasets for difficult queries.
- Limited customizable features: It offers a range of options for customizing the reports and dashboards. But somehow, some couldn’t create unique visualizations and reports.
- Cost: Power BI is a free tool for use at a basic level but you need to pay for some additional features and storage space.
Power BI certification:
There are a plethora of Power BI certifications along with Microsoft Certified. Data Analyst Associate certification that is related to the skill of data analysis, data visualization, and data modeling using Power BI.
Power BI Analyst Salary:
The average salary that a Power BI analyst can earn easily in the US is about $88,000 per year according to Glassdoor.
Versions of Power BI:
Power BI is available in several versions such as Power BI Desktop, Power BI Mobile, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium. Each version has distinctive features and capabilities for data analysis and visualization.
Components of Power BI:
1. Power Pivot:
Power Pivot is a data modeling technique that allows you to make data models make relationships and create calculations. Consequently, it utilizes Data Analyst’s Expression language to model easy and complex data.
2. Power Query:
Power Query combines the data from various sources into a single new data for analysis and visualization. Basically, it allows you to explore, connect, and refine the data sources to fulfill the requirements of analysis. You can download it as an add-in for Excel and also as an add-in Power BI desktop.
3. Power View
Power View is available in Excel, Sharepoint, SQL Server, and Power BI. Basically, this innovative component lets you generate charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals. This will help you to connect the data from different sources and filter the data for different data visualization elements.
4. Power Map:
Power Map of Excel and Power BI is basically a 3D visualization data tool that lets its user add more than a million rows of data on Bing maps in 3-D format by an Excel table or data model in Excel. Consequently, the tool Power Maps works along with the Bing map to provide impressive visualization according to factors like longitude, latitude, country, state, city, street, and address information.
5. Power BI Desktop:
It is a development tool for Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View. Hence, the Power BI desktop can facilitate you with numerous features under a single solution, you can conveniently develop BI and data analysis experience in it.
6. Power Q&A:
The Q&A feature in Power BI lets you explore your data in your own words. Basically, it is the fastest way to get an answer from your data using natural language. An example could be what was the total sales last year. Once you’ve built your data model and deployed that into the Power BI website, then you can ask questions and get answers quickly.
