Power BI Blog Series: Part 1 — Power BI Overview
This is the first blog of the Power BI series that will take you on a step-by-step journey of learning Power BI.
Content of this article:
- Overview.
- Starting with Power BI.
- Basic Parts of Power BI.
- Power BI Desktop Installation Activity.
- Excel to Power BI UI Comparison.
- Why Power BI.
Overview:
The main goal of this Power BI Blog Series is to make you understand Power BI and its features of Power BI is so that you can use this tool in an easy way to build insights into your data.
And it’s recommended to download the latest version of Power BI Desktop on your systems and do a hands-on activity as you go through this series of articles so that you can understand it easily.
In this blog, you will learn about what Power BI is, compare it with a simple excel report & why you must go with Power BI out of all the other data visualization tools available in the current day. Also, you will be installing Power BI Desktop onto our systems as it's very important for our further hand-on implementations. So, let’s start with it!!!
Starting with Power BI:
- Power BI is an interactive data visualization tool developed by Microsoft with its primary focus on business intelligence and it is part of the Microsoft Power Platform.
- You can think of Power BI as a tool that lets you connect hundreds of data sources to it so you can build & share reports and integrate those reports in other products (like Office 365).
Basic Parts of Power BI:
Power BI has three basic elements that we need to know about. They are:
- Power BI Desktop.
- Power BI Service.
- Power BI Mobile Apps.
Power BI Desktop:
Power BI Desktop is a windows desktop application where you can connect to data, transform the data with queries that build insightful data models, and create visualizations and reports on the data models.
Below is the image showing the latest version of Power BI Desktop UI (as of March 2022 Update)
Power BI Service:
Power BI Service is a Software as a service where you can view and interact with the reports. Usually, you create visualizations locally using the Power BI Desktop application and then publish them to the cloud using Power BI Service. Power BI service is also known as Power BI Online.
You can also build reports on Power BI service but there are certain limitations with the things that you can do for a report creation when compared to Power BI Desktop. We will be discussing them in upcoming articles in detail.
Below is the image showing Power BI Service UI:
Power BI Mobile Apps:
Power BI offers a set of mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices. In the mobile apps, you can connect to and interact with your cloud and on-premises data.
The Reports that you build on Power BI Desktop and publish to Power BI Service for the end-users can also be viewed and interacted with through smartphones in a very easy way.
Below is the image showing Power BI Mobile UI (Portrait Mode):
Power BI Desktop Installation Activity:
As we require Power BI Desktop to create our reports, Let’s start with the Power BI Desktop Installation activity.
Follow the below steps:
- Open a browser and go directly to the Power BI Desktop page of the Microsoft Store using the link — https://aka.ms/pbidesktopstore
Or
- Go to the Power BI Desktop product page using the link below, and then select Download Free — https://powerbi.microsoft.com/desktop
This will redirect you to Microsoft Store, where you can login using your account credentials.
Once you provide the credentials, you will be landed on the Power BI Desktop page of the Microsoft Store, select Install as shown below.
Hurray!! You have installed the latest version of Power BI Desktop onto your system.
It’s a very simple activity, right?
You will be doing similar activities in upcoming articles and learning about Power BI.
Excel to Power BI UI Comparison:
Now let’s compare the Excel and Power BI UI samples:
In the above screenshot, the data is in tabular format, and it will take a bit of time to understand the data. Also, if you want to see Sales with respect to each product then it would be difficult to know from the above format.
Now, Let’s see the data from Power BI below:
This report is built on the same dataset which was shown in the earlier image.
As you can see in this Power BI sample report screenshot, you can easily know the sales with respect to each product in a clean format with the help of Power BI Visuals.
And all the data insights can be visualized in an efficient way so that any person who will be going through the report can understand it very easily at a glance.
Benefits of using Power BI over Excel:
- Power BI has faster processing than Excel
- Power BI dashboards are more visually appealing, interactive, and customizable than those in Excel
- It is a more powerful tool than Excel in terms of comparison between tables, reports, or data files and is more user-friendly and easy to use than Excel
Why Power BI:
Below are some of the reasons why we need to consider Power BI over the other tools:
- It’s easy to connect to data sources
- Simple and Interactive UI with drag-and-drop capability for generating the report
- Exceptional Excel & Azure integration
- Excellent data modeling capabilities in Power BI Data Modeling.
- Data Sources: Over 120+ data sources and still growing
- E.g., Microsoft Azure Platform Services, Power Platform, Snowflake, SAP, Amazon Athena, Redshift, Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc.,
- Natural Language Q & A Visual integration in Power BI
- It has awesome features which allow the users to drill down and slice the data
- With native support for R scripts, users can present more advanced business analytics and shaping like machine learning, predictive trends, and smoothing
- Power BI Pro gives you instant access to reports and dashboards for data analysis
- It offers a wide range of detailed and attractive visualizations
- Power BI comes with a ton of pre-packed standard data visuals to leverage in your interactive reports, such as bar, column, line, map, matrix, pie charts, scatter, table, and waterfall — each with their own variety of customization options for enhanced presentation and functionality
- However, we also have a lot of custom visuals created by developers (or in-house) and shared with the Power BI community to represent your data in a way that tells your data story the best
- Security: The service also has Azure Active Directory (AAD) built-in for user authentication, allowing you to leverage Single Sign-On (SSO), along with your regular Power BI login credentials to access your data
- We can also embed Power BI tiles into custom PowerApps apps
- External tools like DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, Power BI Helper, ALM Toolkit enable new features and help in optimizations of the reports which improves report performance
Most important of all: Microsoft updates Power BI every month, where a ton of new features are enabled. Some of them are listed below:
- Enables new features on the Report side which will help in improving the report UI
- Enables Data connectivity with respect to New Data Sources
- Enables customizations on Mobile Layout
- Enables new features on the Power BI Service front
- Optimizes and adds features to the Data Modeling Capabilities
- Adds new features for existing Power BI visuals
- Smooth Integration with new custom visuals from AppSource
- Updates on Embedding Analytics front and paginated reports front
- Enables smooth and fast interaction on all Power BI Platforms. (Desktop/Service/Mobile)
With all these updates and new features added every month, Power BI stands out from the rest of the other Business Intelligence tools in the market.
And that’s all folks! I hope you have got an idea of what Power BI is with this article!!
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