February 10, 2021
Times are tough. Resources are tight. Many teams are spread out remotely. Yet the demands on your business to perform impeccably are increasing. Business Intelligence that leverages collective data, the source for powerful analytics, will provide you the essential insights you need to make informed decisions and optimize your business. Microsoft Power BI, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, provides interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities via a simple user interface. Any user at your organization can be empowered to create their own dashboards and reports.
No more decisions based on a gut feeling. Power BI is highly versatile and makes it easy to collect, store, visualize, automate and analyze data. And it doesn’t matter how many sources you have, or the source — an Excel spreadsheet, a cloud-based or on-premises hybrid data warehouse — it can all be synthesized. It could be performance information about your customers, product, operations, employees, and any interaction in between.
Thankfully, getting started is easy. Anyone can download Power BI Desktop for free to build reports. The per-user licensing for additional recommended features are inexpensive compared to other solutions. Plus, minimal training is needed to get going and start experiencing the benefits.
Business Analytics Ahead of the Pack
Aside from the enticing low cost and easy adoption, with Power BI you get a top-ranked solution. Microsoft has dedicated many resources to promote Power BI’s growth and leadership, which shows in the numerous monthly releases. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Power BI is said to have the most complete vision and highest ability to execute any BI solution on the market. Tech analyst Forrester has ranked Power BI in its top-right quadrant as “Leaders” in the category of Enterprise BI Platforms (vendor-managed).
Power BI also has the largest global footprint compared to its competitors. It’s available in 43 languages, and accessible worldwide with 40 primary and backup datacenters. You can choose the data center closest to you to optimize performance. With built-in global standards, rest assured that you will also maintain compliance with privacy laws (e.g., think statutes like HIPAA in the US).
Empowering a Data Culture in the Digital Transformation
BI has come a long way in a short time. In the early days of BI, data and reporting requests all went through IT. Now the goal is to create a data-driven culture where everyone can build reports. Today you can access data and visualize in new, interesting, and creative ways that tell the story of what’s going on in the business, identify risks, and discover opportunities.
Features that Transform Data into Useful Information
You have read many ways Power BI can benefit your organization. Now onto the details on some of the main features. Data is only as good as how it is used, so you must use tools to discover insights within your data that may not be immediately obvious. These are just some of Power BI’s key features.
Visuals
Real-time Analytics
Power Query
Excel Integration
Built-in AI
Filter Tools
Performance Analyzer
Visuals: Creating a visualization is easy with drag-and-drop, color, shadowing, and other graphical options, and a large canvas. Power BI offers many visuals out-of-the-box in the visualization pane. Many other Power BI visuals are available from Microsoft and Microsoft Partners in the Microsoft AppSource. There are also options to create custom Power BI visuals for your organization, or even published and shared with the Microsoft community!
Real-time Analytics: Live data is critical to being able to identify risks and act quickly. Power BI can help you make timely decisions based on what is happening in the present with data streaming and updates to your dashboards in real-time using time-sensitive data collectors.
Power Query: It’s time to de-silo your disparate, unrelated sources of data and transform them into coherent, visually immersive insights. Power Query allows you to connect many different data sources to create reports, insights, and data visualizations like charts or graphs.
Excel Integration: Excel works seamlessly with Power BI. You can connect Excel queries, reports, and data models to Power BI dashboards to broaden your data analytics and visualizations.
Built-in AI: When looking for trends in your data, AI Insights in Power BI may help you discover more. Power BI provides several pre-trained machine learning models.
Filter Tools: Multiple filtering tools are at your disposal. Cross-filtering gives you more control over applying filters when working with related tables by allowing you to apply filters to one or both sides of a table relationship. Drill through allows you to create a page in your report focusing on a specific entity. Drill through will take you to the focused page for details filtered to that context. To explore in-depth details about your data, you can drill-down or drill-up. When a hierarchy is in place on a visual, drill-down will provide additional details on a specific data point. When hovering over a visual, you will see drill up or down options if a hierarchy is in place.
Performance Analyzer: Wonder why your reports take so long to refresh? Performance Analyzer may have the answer. This feature measures the performance of report elements such as DAX formulas or visuals and displays what is most and least resource-intensive, allowing you to make changes as you need.
Power Up with Other Power Platform Apps
The Microsoft Power Platform spans Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and standalone applications. Combining all the Power Platform apps; Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents enhances your experience and amplifies the total power potential of the platform to empower your workforce.
Using one platform clearly has its benefits. In addition to unlocking your potential with the power of connected Microsoft solutions, you reduce the complexity and security risks that can come with deploying multiple outside systems.
Get Started with JourneyTEAM
As an award-winning Microsoft partner, JourneyTEAM has a proven track record with successful Microsoft technology implementations. Let us show you how to create a data-driven culture at your organization and unleash your potential with data with Power BI! Contact JourneyTEAM today!