Data analysis is one of the most popular and interesting jobs in the world because data is everywhere, whether it’s your social media posts, financial data, insurance-related data, and so on. And the fascinating aspect of data analysis is that anyone can learn and do it because it primarily involves critical thinking and how well you can tell a story about the data that you have analyzed.
Now you might be wondering why am I speaking about Data Analysis when Power BI is what you came to this blog for, don’t you worry we are just about to dive into Power BI one of the most popular platforms in the market for data analysis and visualization to make effective decisions.
Power BI’s tagline — “Bring Your Data to Life,” very clearly demonstrates the purpose of the Microsoft-owned business analytics tool.
Power BI is a platform offered by Microsoft for modeling, analyzing, and visualizing data. You can also share the dashboards and reports that you have generated using Power BI.
In simple terms, you can say that Power BI is a Business Intelligence(BI) tool to analyze and visualize your data and share insights across your organization or to required people. (if needed, you can even attach those reports to your own blog or website :) )
Now let’s break down the above Power BI definition,
- Modeling the data —It is processing the data for storing in the database, where the processing involves filtering the required rows and columns, removing unnecessary rows or columns, formatting the data, etc. There are various techniques available for data modeling like conceptual data modeling, physical data modeling, and logical data modeling. The ultimate goal of Data Modeling is to ensure that the data is consistent and accurate so that we avoid inaccurate results while we analyze it. (For further details on Data Modeling, you can refer to Microsoft’s documentation on “What is Data Modeling?”)
- Analyzing the data — now once you have your data organized you can proceed with analyzing the data to get your results which can then be helpful in making informed decisions. By manipulating the data using various data analysis techniques, you can begin to find trends, correlations, outliers, and variations that help you to stitch an interesting story to tell to your audience.
- Visualizing the data —after you have analyzed your data you can proceed using the data visualization platforms or tools like Power BI to generate the dashboards and charts. It’s just the graphical representation of your data.
Let us take an example situation for the above, there is an online sales company that wants to know about the impact on its sales after they’ve launched a new sales plan. The first step they do is to collect the data through various forms — sales by city, sales hourly, weekly, etc. Once all the data is collected they go ahead and remove unwanted data that is there, format or restructure the data and then analyze the data to get the answer to their main question (impact on its sales after the launch of a new sales plan)Right, everything is fine till now but if they directly show the numbers and data that they’ve collected it might confuse the people who are listening, so they make use of visualization here by generating the charts on top of the data this helps in telling the main focus points easily since we all know that human brains process images faster than text.
Power BI works by getting data from some data source like a database, spreadsheet, text file, or of webpage and then loading it into a data model. That data model then allows you to build data visualizations. The core tool in this process is Power BI Desktop.
Power BI Desktop is a free desktop application from Microsoft that can be installed on your Windows machine, and it is the primary tool for creating data models and reports in Power BI. From Power BI Desktop, you can save your reports locally to your hard drive as a document, which has a file extension of PBIX. Power BI developers often refer to these locally stored reports as PBIX files.
Within Power BI Desktop, there’s another application called Power Query. Power Query is used to connecting to one or more data sources and perform all of the necessary data preparation steps to build your data model. When you complete your preparation, Power Query will retrieve your data, process it using your data preparation steps, and load it into the final data model. This data model is stored in Power BI inside a tool called the x-velocity in-memory analysis engine which is an integral part of Power BI — the x-velocity engine for short. The x-velocity engine is actually a database inside Power BI that stores your data model and compresses the data down to a fraction of its original size. This not only allows Power BI to work with huge data models that are millions of rows in size, but it also provides a huge performance advantage when we’re doing calculations against our data.
With the data securely stored and compressed within your data model, you use the Report Editor in Power BI Desktop to build your data visualizations including all of your charts, tables, maps, and other content that helps you tell the story of your data.
Probably the most important feature after the ability to create reports, is your ability to share them with your colleagues across your organization or even embed them in an app or website. After all, what good is insightful data visualization if you’re the only person who can see it? To allow you to share your hard work, Microsoft provides two platforms for hosting your finished Power BI reports.
The biggest of these platforms is the Power BI service. This is an online Software as a Service portal accessible through powerbi.com. The Power BI service is a cloud application owned and operated by Microsoft, so it uses its infrastructure to store and run your reports. You can sign up for an account using your company or school email address. Once you’ve set up an account with the Power BI service, you can either upload your finished PBIX files to the Power BI service, or you can publish them directly from the Power BI desktop. From there, you can easily share the reports with your colleagues who also have access to the Power BI service. You can even share the reports publicly on your blog or website using the publish-to-web feature.
The second platform for sharing your reports is Power BI Report Server. This is an on-premises application that your school or company can host on their own infrastructure instead of in the cloud. The Report Server sits behind your organization’s firewall, so it’s not as easily accessible as the service. And the Report Server doesn’t have as many features as the service, however, it’s still a great and affordable way to host Power BI reports in the event your organization already has the on-premises infrastructure to support it.
Lastly, there is a Power BI mobile app where you can access reports from either the service or the Report Server on your phone or mobile device. This requires you to develop your report with a mobile layout.
Still have time in hand?, and want to continue reading go ahead and visit part 2 — Power BI Introduction (Part 2).
The secret of success is getting started — quotes by Unknown
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