What is Microsoft’s Power BI and Why Power BI?
What is Microsoft’s Power BI?
Microsoft’s Power BI is a business intelligence tool that helps users to connect with different data sources and transform those data in order to form interactive visualizations or BI reports. Power BI is a complete package of software services, apps, and connectors which has the responsibility to perform task together in order to satisfy the requirements of business intelligence. With the help of Power BI, you can get data from various sources starting from standalone excel files to complex online services like dataverse.
Components of Power BI:
There are four important components of Power BI, those are:-
1. Power BI Desktop:
Power BI desktop is an application that is available for free and you have to install it on your local desktop. It helps you to connect with different data sources. After that, you can transform and combine those data to form a data model. With the help of this data model, you can form visuals. Power BI desktop application has the responsibility to build reports. But only by using Power BI desktop, you can’t share these reports with other members of your team/ organization. For that, you have to use another component of Power BI, that is Power BI service.
2. Power BI Gateway:
Power BI Gateway is a software which has the responsibility to provide you an access to the on-premises data network. Gateway basically provides security to the data present inside on-premises data source. Gateway verifies every user request before authorizing access. If you are thinking gateways can transfer on-premises data to users, then you are wrong. It has the responsibility to connect user with the on-premises data sources.
3. Power BI Mobile Apps :
Power BI mobile apps are also available for iOS, Android, and Windows phones. Power BI mobile apps allow you to connect and interact inside workspaces. When you create reports and dashboards on Power BI desktop and publish those on Power BI service, you can view all of these reports and dashboards (available of Power Bi service and on-premises data sources) through Power BI mobile apps. You can not only view all of these reports and dashboards, but also you can interact with all of these through Power BI mobile apps.
4. Power BI Service:
The Power BI service is also known as Power BI online. It is the cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) component of Power BI. You can view or edit all of your reports and dashboards on Power BI service. Apart from that, you can share your reports with other users/ organizations for collaboration and distribution. If you want to connect with data sources through Power BI service, you can definitely do that. Again, you can do few modeling operations too. Unlike Power BI desktop, the license of Power BI service is not free.
Why Power BI?
There are several benefits of Power BI which are mentioned below.
1. User-friendly Interface
2. Power of Cloud-based tools
3. Real-time Interactions
4. Custom Visualizations
5. Customization of security (RLS- Row-level security)
6. Easy integration with Azure Machine Learning
Thanks for reading.
Original Source: https://nblik.com/article/192051/4675?title=What-is-Microsoft%27s-Power-BI-and-Why-Power-BI?
