Getting started with Microsoft Power BI Tool

This article is for the beginners to help them understand the basic concepts of Microsoft Power BI. Also, it will give you enough understanding on Power BI and you can choose your suitable area where you want to implement.

I will tell you what is Microsoft Power BI, how we can download Microsoft PowerBI? Benefits of using Power BI in Office 365 for IT professionals, end users etc. Why should we choose Power BI over other tools?

What is Microsoft Power BI

Power BI is a tool largely used to create different visual interactive dashboards and BI reports. It Connects to hundreds of data sources, and produce beautiful reports, then publish them for your organization to consume on the web and across mobile devices.

Power BI suite provides multiple software, connector, and services – Power BI desktop, Power BI service and mobile Power BI apps available for different platforms.

These set of services are used by business users to consume data and build BI reports. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique view of their business. And scale across the enterprise.

Microsoft Power BI Download (Desktop/Mobile)

To download the latest version of Microsoft Power BI desktop version, you can use the following link −

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

Benefits of Microsoft Power BI

IT professional

• No code solution for building interactive reports and dashboards in Power BI.
• By using Power BI you can achieve compliance and keep data secure while providing access to the reports, dashboards
• Meet the growing business need for consumable data
• Easy understanding in learning all the features of the tool. Can save huge time and cost if you are using Power BI.
• Spend less time on infrastructure maintenance or report development.
• Easy portability can be achieved on any device. No extra maintenance is required.

Power BI analyst

A Power BI analyst is able to do below things:

• Can connect to secure data with ease and confidence
• Can explore data visually with many visualizations.
• navigate through data quickly, optimized for performance
• pull data together from different sources, create data models and impactful, interactive reports
• easily share data models and reports with end users
• Connect to hundreds of sources, prep data with ease, and create beautiful reports, all in minutes.

An end user is empowered to

• User-friendly interactive dashboards, reports  and can see results quickly
• Can filter data real time and monitor what matters most, in one place
• Can share reports and dashboards with others with easy options
• stay connected from anywhere
• View dashboards on the web or on your phone, get alerts when data changes

Why we should consider Microsoft Power BI over other BI tools

There are many tools available such as Tableau, Qlik, etc., for analysts that provide all intelligence features and are created especially for data specialists but with Power BI you can empower anyone with all the features with the ease which takes a few minutes to start creating personalized dashboards to find answers to the most important questions for your business.

Apart from this, these are below reasons you should consider using Microsoft Power BI.

User-friendly tool:

One of my favourite things about Microsoft Power BI is that it is so simple to turn data into meaningful visualizations quickly. You can drag and drop system of creating visuals, pick the visual, choose the data you want in it and boom you have an interactive way of looking at your data.

You can have a report or dashboard going in minutes after you import your data.

Easy to share:

Once you have a report or dashboard that you are happy with it is super simple to share with people both in and out of your organization.

Simple to understand:

You can use natural language to interact with your data when you publish it to the Microsoft Power BI service.

Microsoft Power BI pricing and licensing

As we know Power BI suite provides multiple software, connector, and services – Power BI desktop, Power BI service and mobile Power BI apps available for different platforms.

Microsoft Power BI Desktop:

Power BI desktop is a free tool to any single user and includes data cleaning and preparation, custom visualizations and the ability to publish to the Power BI service.

• Can connect to hundreds of data sources
• Clean and prepare data using visual tools
• Build stunning reports with custom visualizations
• Publish to the Power BI service
• Embed on public websites.

Integration of Three Components

• Power Query
• Power Pivot
• Power View

Power BI Pro:

The Pro plan costs $9.99/user/month. It includes data collaboration, and real-time view and the ability to publish reports anywhere. Users can try it a free trial for 60 days before purchasing the subscription.

• Power BI Services is used to publish the reports.
• Build dashboards that deliver a 360-degree, real-time view of the business
• Keep data up-to-date automatically, including on-premises sources
• Collaborate on shared data
• Audit and govern how data is accessed and used
• Package content and distribute to users with apps

Power BI Premium:

The Premium plan is built on a capacity pricing, charging per node per month. Power BI offers a premium version cost calculator for custom quote ranges based on the number of pros, frequent and occasional users who will be active on an account’s premium version of the software.

• The gain dedicated capacity you allocate, scale, and control
• Distribute and embed content without purchasing per-user licenses
• Publish reports on-premises with Power BI Report Server

Power BI other components

The Power BI service

Power BI services make it easy to get data from different sources for faster, more insightful business decisions. With Power BI, you get a rich, consolidated view of key information, no matter where all of the data is stored. Below are a few available services and app categories.

Live dashboards

A Power BI dashboard is a set of data visualizations, or charts, from one or more underlying reports, presented in an engaging way that makes it easy to glean insights – no analytics expertise needed.

An advantage of Power BI is that dashboards are live. In Power BI, dashboards are not only for viewing – they are interactive tools. If there is information on a dashboard that you want to look into more deeply, drill down into the underlying reports to see details.

Interactive reports

With a user-friendly interface, Power BI enables anyone to create rich, interactive reports.

A report is a set of charts, also known as visualizations. You may construct a report from scratch, select a report generated in Power BI Desktop, or apply a default report for a given dataset.

Reports can be customized Reports are the foundation for dashboards. Once a report contains the desired visualizations, pin the report, or a subset of its contents, to a dashboard for ease of viewing.

Reports can also be shared with other individuals in an organization and consumed on both desktop computers and mobile devices.

Data visualizations

Dashboards and reports are built using visualizations, or charts. Power BI offers a variety of visualization options, enabling you to present data in a meaningful and visually appealing manner. There is the number of visualizations available that can be applied to any dataset. These include:

• composition charts (treemaps, donut and pie charts)
• comparison charts (bar, line, basic area, and waterfall charts),
• mixed comparison and composition charts (stacked charts)
• relationship charts (bubble charts)
• geographical charts
• gauges based on a percentage value

Below are few samples which depict different nature of data.

Mobile applications

Power BI supports live, secure dashboard access on any device through native, interactive apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. To enhance the viewing experience, the dashboard user interface is optimized for smaller displays. Collaborate with others by sharing your annotated snapshot via SMS or email.

Natural Language Query

Natural language query – also known as Q&A – is a unique feature of Power BI that lets you ask questions of your data phrased in plain English, and produces answers in the form of new visualizations, or charts.

Ask anything of your data – Q&A then intelligently filters, sorts, aggregates, groups, and displays data based on keywords in the question asked. Below is a sample query on Retail Analysis sample report.

You may like following Power BI tutorials:

• Power BI: Create a various report from SharePoint Online list
• Access to the resource is forbidden error in Power BI
• Create a Power BI report from Excel using Power BI Desktop
• Power Bi relative date slicer
• Add Web Content to Power BI Dashboard
• How to Split Columns in Power BI
• Enter Data into Power BI Desktop
• Power BI Buttons
• Power BI Workbooks
• Power BI Error: This content isn’t available
• Power BI On-premises Data Gateway
• How to share Power BI Dashboard and Report
• Power BI Custom Visuals

In this power bi tutorial, I explained to you what is power bi? advantages of power bi for IT professionals, Power BI analyst and to end users. How can we download power bi desktop, about microsoft power bi pricing and licensing? Live dashboards, interactive reports, data visualizations using microsoft power bi.