Data Visualization using Power BI

Data Visualization is one of the major processes used in the field Business Intelligence. It is basically, transforming and portraying raw data into a more readable form to the business users.

Very recently, I got my hands on a data viz tool called Power BI. It has various data source connections like MS Excel, CSV files, Azure databases, MS SQL Servers etc. Reports and Dashboards can be prepared after connecting to the data sources and shared to the business users.

The project I had been working on involved real-time dashboards which update every 3 minutes hence displaying data accurately on it was a very crucial task.

Time series graph is the best way to represent minute wise data. The relation between sensor data like Pressure, Voltage, Current and Frequency with Time is beneficial to observe patterns of spikes and constant line. Power BI has wonderful card tiles in which by applying the appropriate filters, one can display the last/first/current temperature/pressure of the day/hour.

Being creative is the most important skill of a Data Visualizer. Color combinations should be apt and not very bright. During this process I learnt very cool tricks one could use while making reports / dashboards on Power BI

1. Bookmark feature come in handy when you want to display same parameters of data for different components. Example : for 3 different machines of data which had same parameters like (Power Factor, Frequency, etc) I developed 3 different reports and bookmark feature helped the user navigate among the pages by just clicking on a tile or an arrow button.
2. Using of DAX queries is highly useful. It is a straight-forward way to transform or customize your data according to the user needs. It has various functions like COUNT, MAX, FILTER, ISBLANK and many more which will ace your calculations for representing the data.
3. There are a lot of formatting changing options in the Power Query Editor. Example : I used the date format feature extensively while displaying my date-time data on bar graphs.
4. Creating relationships between two tables is also available on Power BI. Sometimes we do not get all the data in a single table/excel sheet. There is a provision of creating JOINS in the table section of Power BI with just few clicks. This way the data can easily merge and more information can be extracted out of it.
5. Slicer is a great way to display day,month or year wise data. With a date slicer you can represent your historic data very easily. Slicers for showing information department wise,country wise, etc can also create good demarcations to represent your data.

The best way to learn a tool is to simply download a data set and start exploring on your own!

Microsoft Blogs also helped me a lot with tackling challenges I faced during developing the dashboards. A lot of queries can be answered through it.