Tell compelling insights using Power BI

Whether it’s using interactive dashboards to consolidate critical metrics or rich reports to connect datasets from workloads, Power BI is a crucial tool to engage with business data, visualize and enable smarter data-driven decisions.

Three flavors of Power BI

• Power BI Desktop— windows desktop application
• Power BI service — online SaaS (Software as a Service) service
• Power BI mobile — apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices

5 reasons to use Power BI

How do you know whether Power BI is right for you or your organization? Here are seven reasons to choose Power BI:

1. No specialized training is required. You’ll get a plethora of visuals, design templates, and customizations to quickly gain insights with an uncomplicated setup. Microsoft official documentation is sufficient and is of good quality.
2. Real-time information. Dashboards update in real-time as data is pushed or streamed in, which gives viewers the ability to solve problems and identify opportunities quickly. Any report or dashboard can display and update real-time data and visuals. Sources of streaming data can be factory sensors, social media sources, or anything from which time-sensitive data can be collected or transmitted.
3. Streamlined publication and distribution. Instead of emailing large files or putting them on a shared drive, analysts upload reports and visualizations to the Power BI service. Their data is refreshed whenever the underlying dataset is updated.
4. Ability to customize security features. Report developers can set up row-level security (RLS) access filters to ensure that viewers see only data relevant to them, mitigating the risk of people seeing information they shouldn’t
5. Artificial Intelligence. Power BI users can access image recognition and text analytics, create machine learning models, and integrate with Azure Machine Learning.

I will showcase a small use case where I will build a Power BI dashboard using an official WHO covid vaccination dataset. (Available here)

Step 1: Open Power BI Desktop and click ‘Get data’ and select import the csv dataset.

Step 2: Click transform the data. We can alter the structure of our data here like change any column name, modify column data format, add or remove columns or create a calculated column or a measure.

Step 3: Add DAX formula to derive a new column

The below DAX will extract the vaccine name from the column ‘VACCINE_USED’

VACCINE_NAME = MID(‘vaccination-data’[VACCINES_USED], 1, FIND(“ — “,’vaccination-data’[VACCINES_USED],1,0))

Step 4: For the first visual, we will select an area chart and pick the column shown below. It will give us the type of vaccines being used over a time period. As you can see ‘AstraZeneca’ was the most used vaccine all over the world.

I will add another visual which is the Treemap which will show Vaccine usage by regions* like EURO, WPRO, AMRO etc.

We can cover over the visual to see the tooltip and see the data corresponding to that particular tile.

*These regions are designated by WHO

I will add two more table visuals that will show the top 10 countries by vaccination count per 100 (top left visual) and top 10 countries by total vaccination count (bottom left visual).

We can clearly see that both visuals display different orders of countries. One key insight we get here is: larger nations (with large populations), although top in the total vaccination, but the smaller nations supersede the former in vaccinating most of their citizens.

Step 5: We can use additional AI capabilities of QA visual to write questions in normal text format and get answers intelligently.

The above example is a very small part of what Power BI can do. There are a lot of features available when one signs up at an enterprise-level, gets a Power BI Pro license, adds a dedicated capacity for their organizations, and uses additional Microsoft Azure services.

I have used several features of Power BI that come with a PRO license like Publish content to other workspaces, share dashboards, subscribe to dashboards and reports, share with users who have a Pro license.

Anyone who is curious and passionate about Data Analytics and Visualization and wants to learn more about it can connect with me on LinkedIn. (Find me!)
I love sharing my experiences and would love to connect with like minded professionals.