An Overview of Power BI

Every organization now has loads of data, from transactional data to data about its consumers and employees. Having access to so much data can give businesses a greater understanding of their processes, their consumers, or what actions they need to take to grow in the right direction. However, these insights cannot simply be gained by looking at the data on a granular level.

To make the most out of the data, data visualizations and dashboards can be leveraged to provide a view of important business metrics to company leaders and help them make data driven decisions. Power BI is one such tool that helps bridge the gap between data and decision making. It allows users to connect to different data sources and helps them create visualizations and gain deeper insights.

Accessing Power BI

Power BI has 3 different elements:

• Power BI Desktop — this is a free application you can download which allows you to connect, transform and visualize data. You can connect data from different sources and create a data model, create various visuals to depict your data, and also publish your report from Power BI Desktop to Power BI service.
• Power BI Service — this is the online version of Power BI (app.powerbi.com) where you can view published reports, create dashboards, manage workspaces, manage access, and even schedule report refreshes.
• Power BI Mobile — you can download the Power BI application on your mobile phone or other devices and access reports and dashboards on the go.

Creating Power BI Reports

In order to create a Power BI report, you need to do the following:

1. Connect to the appropriate data sources

• You can connect to a number of different sources such as Excel, Sharepoint, Azure, Databases, and various online services. To see all the sources you can connect to. Click on “Get Data” in Power BI Desktop

2. Create a data model, if applicable

• If you are connecting various different sources and tables, it is important to have a good data model.

To learn more about modeling data in Power BI, visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/model-data-power-bi/

3. Create the report

• After you have connected to all the data sources and created the data model, you can experiment with different visualizations to give you the best results for the metrics you are trying to portray
• You also have the ability to import custom visualizations but clicking the three dots on the visualization pane and selecting “Get More Visuals.”

Please consult your company’s security policies before importing custom visuals as they may violate your company’s protocol.

4. Publishing the report

• Once you have created your report, you can publish it to Power BI service by clicking the “Publish” button.
• You can also publish reports to specific workspaces.

To learn more about workspaces or how to create a workspace, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/service-basic-concepts

5. Scheduling refreshes

Once you have published a report, you can decide how often you would like the report to be refreshed. Based on the method you used to access the data such as import mode, LiveConnect mode, or DirectQuery mode, it affects how refreshes can be scheduled

• Import Mode — this is when Power BI directly imports data from the data sources and stores it. Since the data is not constantly flowing from the source to Power BI, you will have to schedule data refreshes so that dataset can be updated in an appropriate cadence
• LiveConnect or DirectQuery Mode — this is when Power BI does not import the data, but instead queries the source and returns the data. Since the data is not being stored, as it would in the import mode, a refresh does not have to be scheduled. You can just hit the refresh button whenever you access the data and the report will automatically be updated to the latest data

To learn more about data refresh in Power BI, please refer to: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-data

6. Monitoring usage

• After you have published the report and scheduled the usage, you can see how the report is performing, how often it is used and who it is used by the most. This can allow you to gain insight and receive feedback from end users to fine tune your dashboards and reports and make it more catered to the users needs
• To monitor usage, go to the appropriate published report, click on the 3 dots and select “View usage metrics report”

Advantages of Using Power BI

• Quickly connect, access, and consolidate multiple data sources — you can access data from multiple different sources and connect all the sources together and create a data model within Power BI
• Transform data directly in Power BI — you can make transformations on the data within Power BI to make the data structure and format align more with your business needs
• Leveraging DAX formulas — you can use various Power BI DAX formulas to take your data one step further by creating different measures, aggregations, custom columns, etc.
• Intuitive Visualizations — you can then use the visualizations that are already built into Power BI or import new ones to based on your business needs to make the data come to life
• Share reports instantly — you can publish the reports and dashboards you have created across your organization/different workspaces, allowing people to gain insights and make data driven decisions

Power BI is an extremely useful tool when trying to make sense of big data and these are just some of it’s few capabilities. The possibilities are endless!

If you would like us to evaluate and review your current use-cases for Power BI, please email us at info@datasurge.com or complete the form on our contact us page.