Streamline Your Business Analytics with Power BI
Good data is at the core of any good business action. It is necessary to identify project tolerances, measure performance, provide analytics, and so much more. Without good data, your business is effectively running blind.
Power BI is a brilliant tool in this regard. By using this tool, you will be able to create reports housing all your relevant data, in a range of visual representations and models. With Power BI, you can create a nexus for all your data, pulling it in from wherever your data stores might be. While a data warehouse is certainly compatible with this, data lakes are particularly well suited to the job, given their benefits and focus on raw data.
Once Power BI is set up and fed your data, you will have access to a range of analytical tools, allowing you to create accurate models from your data in a secure fashion. Let’s delve deeper into exactly why you should use this tool, and what good it can do you and your business.
Power BI makes data connection a breeze
The main hurdle to data analysis is compiling it in one place. This is a problem suffered particularly by data warehouses, where data is often scattered across multiple different servers, sometimes in entirely different buildings. Power BI can act as a central hub for your data, similar to a data lake, coalescing in one place and making data analysis, organisation, and accessibility much easier. When it comes to creating reports, this is incredibly advantageous.
Power BI isn’t limited to taking in data from servers though; data from a wide range of commonly used applications and platforms can be stored, including key tools such as Google Analytics, Excel Spreadsheets, and One Drive, to name a small few. Power BI is capable of supporting over 70 connectors from the start, so you won’t have to worry about missing out on your most used platforms and applications. With all these pre-built connectors, you should be able to load up your data from pretty much anywhere, though don’t worry if you use something that isn’t supported by default. You can easily customise Power BI’s dashboards to your liking, or create entirely new ones through a process of importing your data and adjusting the existing tools and dashboards to better suit your needs. Once everything is geared toward the platforms your business uses, you’ll be ready to analyse your data with ease.
Power BI is an analytical powerhouse
We’ve touted the analytical capabilities of Power BI so far, but let’s get into a bit more detail with exactly what it can offer. Firstly, Power BI comes equipped with a data modelling engine called Power Pivot, something users of Excel will likely be familiar with. What Excel users might not be familiar with, however, are large-scale data models with high performance. Unlike Excel, Power BI is capable of creating models far in excess of what Excel can without suffering the same drops to performance, compressing them down to be much smaller to boot. This makes creating and maintaining data models much less tedious and storage-consuming, as you won’t have to deal with the irritation of increasingly slow models as they pass a certain number of records.
Another excellent feature of Power BI is its automatic data refreshes, keeping your important data relevant as and when you need it, with very little user input required. But this is just one of Power BI’s more advanced functions. It brings over many of the more advanced features found in Excel, such as quick measuring and forecasting.
Get important business questions answered
Questions about important business operations require swift answers. With Power BI, you can get those all-important quick answers by using the Q&A feature. You aren’t limited to formal or software engineer-level language; the Q&A feature responds perfectly well to conversational English, making the process of getting an answer simple.
For those wanting more advanced or specific answers, there are tools available to meet those needs. By double-clicking a clear section of your report, you can select the “Ask a Question” feature. This will allow you to ask more detailed questions about a specific topic. Additionally, when typing out your question, Power BI will suggest queries relevant to the report or data visualisation you have open. This can be especially helpful to get answers to questions you might overlook, or simply ones you forgot to ask. For mobile users, the Q&A feature supports voice recognition, allowing you to get important information at a glance, without having to stop what you’re currently busy with.
Open source visuals make customisation simple
Good visualisation and presentation are almost as important as the data itself. Accurate data that is dense and difficult to read makes acting on it difficult, so ensuring it can be followed with ease is a high priority. Power BI offers assistance to this end, coming with pre-stocked, open-source visuals. You could choose to use these visuals, which include customisable charts, tables, heatmaps, and plenty more, or you could instead opt for custom visuals.
Members of the Power BI community have developed and shared their own custom visuals, which may be a better fit for your business than the pre-stocked options. Alternatively, you could do the legwork yourself and create tailor-made visuals, enabling you to organise and display your data and insights in a way most suitable for your business. With the sheer amount of visuals available, finding the best fit for your business is only a matter of time.
Should you use Power BI?
Implementing Power BI into your business operations brings with it significant benefits. You will have access to methods that streamline data handling significantly, both in terms of data management and display. As the digital world and the business world mesh together at an ever-growing rate, finding solutions to managing our exponential reliance on data is of the utmost importance. Power BI hosts a complement of tools that take some of this strain off, making it a very good choice to handle your data needs.
