Power BI, originally called Project Crescent, was launched in July 2011, bundled with SQL Server. Later, it was renamed Power BI and presented as Power BI for Office 365 in September 2013. It was released as a standalone product in July 2015 after adding more features including enterprise-level data connectivity and security options, apart from its original Excel features like Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View. Now Microsoft brings regular updates of the Power BI application with new features and improvements every month and users can download the latest edition from the Power BI site. The Windows Store has Power BI Desktop, which Windows 10 users can get from.
Let us learn more about the different features of power BI, its components, and its benefits of power BI.
Features of Power BI
1. Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is free software that can be downloaded and installed to build reports by accessing data easily without the need for advanced report designing or query skills to build a report.
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2. Stream Analytics
Stream Analytics helps to assist in real-time analytics to make timely decisions.
3. Multiple Data Sources
Multiple Data Sources support various data sources like Excel, CSV, SQL Server, Web files, etc. to create interactive visualizations.
4. Custom Visualization
Custom Visualization is used to access the custom visualization library to suit individual or customized needs, apart from Power BI's default standard of dealing with complex data.
5. Artificial Intelligence
AI helps to access image recognition and text analytics, create machine learning models with automated machine learning capabilities, and also integrate with Azure Machine Learning.
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kaniniBenefits of Power BI
Microsoft Power BI advantages could be the right choice for any business big, medium, or small that is looking for reporting and analytical capabilities beyond Excel as it offers easy data visualization and analysis across the entire business and gets deep insights into the business operation and performance.
Here is a rundown of the undeniable Power BI benefits that all types of businesses can available as per their business needs.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Allows Analysis and Sharing of Big Data
- Integration with a Wide Array of Data Sources
- Personalized Dashboards and Interactive Reports
- No Geographic Limits to Accessing Power BI
- Access to Information in Real-time
- Excel integration
- Frequent and Consistent Updates
- Interactive UI/UX Features
- Customizing Security Features
- Cost-Effective and Affordable
- No Need for Any Specialized Technical Support
- Anywhere, Any-device Accessibility
- Added Functionality with Other Microsoft Apps
- Effective Collaboration
- Time-Saving Templates
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In the Power BI uses and advantages list, the topmost benefits of Microsoft Power BI perhaps are that it allows access to image recognition, and text analytics, creates machine learning models, and also to integrate with Azure Machine Learning. Microsoft AI’s latest features allow even non-data scientists to prepare data, build machine learning models, find insights from structured and unstructured data.
2. Allows Analysis and Sharing of Big Data
Using Power BI with Azure helps to tackle colossal volumes of data and helps to reduce the time taken to get insights, increasing collaboration between business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.
In the era of big data, where organizations deal with vast volumes of diverse data sets, Power BI stands out as a tool capable of handling large datasets efficiently. The platform's robust architecture allows for seamless integration and analysis of big data, providing valuable insights that might otherwise remain hidden. Furthermore, Power BI facilitates the sharing of these insights, enabling collaborative decision-making based on a comprehensive understanding of large and complex datasets. While Power BI indeed integrates AI, but it also has built-in AI features, such as AutoML and AI Insights, provide such capabilities rather than having embedded machine learning algorithms. After listening to all these benefits you might definitely would love to learn more about this and for this we have got your back, check out this amazing Power BI training to upskill yourself and visualize better.
3. Integration with a Wide Array of Data Sources
- A cornerstone of Power BI's versatility is its seamless integration with a diverse range of data sources, positioning it as a comprehensive business analytics solution. Power BI transcends traditional boundaries by effortlessly connecting to an extensive array of data platforms, databases, and cloud services.
- Users can consolidate information from sources such as Excel spreadsheets, cloud-based applications, on-premises databases, and even streaming data in real-time. This agnostic approach to data connectivity ensures that organizations can harness insights from various facets of their operations, breaking down silos and providing a holistic view of their business landscape.
- Whether it's structured or unstructured data, Power BI's adaptability ensures that users can bring together information from disparate sources, facilitating a more comprehensive and integrated analysis. This feature not only enhances the accuracy of insights but also empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions based on a unified understanding of their data ecosystem.
4. Personalized Dashboards and Interactive Reports
Power BI dashboard benefits include a customizable, intuitive, interactive dashboard instead of one-size-fits-all, as per a company’s needs with an easy drag-and-drop functionality option for generating a customized report. Options for producing powerful models and visualizations make the advantages of the Power BI dashboard almost limitless.
Often businesses need multiple Power BI dashboards and reports. The Power BI Pro users can quickly deploy a collection of purpose-built dashboards and reports and distribute them to the entire organization or specific teams or departments with the Power BI Apps.
5. No Geographic Limits to Accessing Power BI
In the age of remote work and global collaboration, the ability to access analytics tools without geographic constraints is paramount. Power BI offers users the flexibility to connect and collaborate from any location. Whether team members are working from different offices, across various time zones, or remotely, Power BI breaks down geographical barriers. This accessibility ensures that decision-makers have real-time insights, fostering a more agile and responsive organizational culture.
6. Access to Information in Real-time
The dashboard gets updated in real-time whenever data is pushed or streamed while displaying and updating the visuals with the latest data and information enabling solving problems quickly, identifying opportunities, and timely handling of time-sensitive data efficiently.
Microsoft brings regular monthly updates and offers a Power BI community platform where users can provide suggestions. It listens and implements the most frequently asked-for functionality by users. It means that the users always get access to the latest and most advanced features that help them make accurate business decisions.
7. Excel integration
Hundreds of businesses still use Excel for analytics and reports. The Power BI benefits for businesses preferring to continue with Excel lies in its superb seamless integration with Excel helps to connect queries, data models, and reports to Power BI dashboards and create interactive visualizations with instant access to the right data whenever needed.
8. Frequent and Consistent Updates
Staying ahead in the fast-paced world of data analytics requires continuous innovation and adaptation. Power BI addresses this need with its commitment to frequent and consistent updates. Microsoft regularly introduces new features, enhancements, and performance improvements, ensuring that Power BI remains at the forefront of analytics technology. Users can expect to benefit from the latest advancements without the hassle of manual updates, staying relevant and competitive in an ever-evolving business landscape.
9. Interactive UI/UX Features
Making things visually appealing, easy drag and drop functionality with features to copy all formatting across visualizations. User experience (UX) is a critical aspect of any analytics tool, and Power BI excels in providing an interactive and intuitive user interface (UI). The platform's design prioritizes user-friendliness, making data analysis accessible to a wide range of users, regardless of their technical expertise. Interactive features, such as drill-through functionality, allow users to explore data at a granular level, gaining deeper insights with a few clicks. This emphasis on a positive user experience contributes to increased adoption and utilization across the organization.
10. Customizing Security Features
It is possible to set up row-level-security (RSL) filters to ensure that viewers can only see the relevant data, preventing data from being misused by mitigating the data breach risk.
11. Cost-Effective and Affordable
- Power BI is relatively less expensive and affordable especially for small and mid-sized businesses compared to other business intelligence and analytics tools and an appropriate version of Power BI can be chosen as per the need.
- Power BI users can avail of three different versions: Power BI Desktop, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium. Power BI Desktop is a free version that tiny businesses or start-ups can download on a desktop to make reports and dashboards.
- BI Pro, on the other hand, is quite affordable for small and mid-sized companies with just $9.99 USD per user per month. At the same time, the Power BI Premium pricing depends on the deployment size and the number of users.
12. No Need for Any Specialized Technical Support
Power BI is a self-service business intelligence platform. No technical or IT team is required to run it, create analysis or generate reports. Furthermore, it supports a natural language interface and uses intuitive graphic designer tools. The simple drag-and-drop functionality helps to create dashboards quickly with a few mouse clicks. All these make Power BI very user-friendly and can be used by anyone without much technical knowledge.
13. Anywhere, Any-device Accessibility
Irrespective of the place of work (from home, on the go, in a client meeting), Power BI can be accessed by anyone in the team through iOS, Android, and Windows devices. All it needs is an internet connection.
14. Added Functionality with Other Microsoft Apps
- Power BI's integration with other Microsoft applications forms a strategic alliance that goes beyond standalone analytics, providing users with added functionality and a cohesive ecosystem. This interoperability extends the reach and impact of Power BI by seamlessly connecting it with Microsoft's suite of productivity tools.
- The integration with Microsoft Excel, SharePoint, and Teams, among others, creates a unified platform where data-driven insights seamlessly merge with broader business processes. Users can import data directly from Excel, enhancing spreadsheet-based analysis with the advanced visualization capabilities of Power BI. SharePoint integration facilitates the easy sharing of reports, fostering collaboration and ensuring a centralized repository for data-driven insights.
- Moreover, the connection with Microsoft Teams streamlines communication and decision-making. Users can embed Power BI reports directly within Teams, ensuring that analytics insights become an integral part of team conversations and discussions.
- The synergy between Power BI and other Microsoft apps not only enhances functionality but also streamlines workflows. It eliminates the silos between data analytics and day-to-day operations, creating a seamless experience where data insights seamlessly flow through various facets of the Microsoft ecosystem.
15. Effective Collaboration
With its great team collaboration feature, Power BI helps a team to share dashboards or reports within its workspaces and allows co-ownership of a report or dashboard. Its ‘Chat in Team’s button for reports and Power BI tabs enables everyone in the channel to get notified whenever a new report is generated. The report can even be embedded in an external site, or the links of the report could be shared via Outlook.
16. Time-Saving Templates
- In the fast-paced world of business analytics, efficiency is paramount, and Power BI addresses this need with its innovative time-saving templates. These pre-built templates significantly expedite the process of report creation, allowing users to jumpstart their analytics journey without the need for extensive customization.
- Power BI's library of templates covers a diverse range of industries, functions, and data scenarios. Whether it's financial reports, sales dashboards, or operational performance metrics, these templates serve as invaluable starting points. Users can leverage the expertise embedded in these templates, saving substantial time and effort that would otherwise be spent designing reports from scratch.
- The beauty of Power BI's time-saving templates lies not only in their convenience but also in their adaptability. Users can customize these templates to align with their specific requirements, ensuring that the resulting reports are not just expedited but also tailored to the unique needs of their business.
- This feature is particularly advantageous for businesses aiming to implement standardized reporting practices across departments or organizations. The consistent structure facilitated by these templates not only saves time but also ensures uniformity and coherence in the presentation of data.
- In essence, Power BI's time-saving templates are a testament to the platform's commitment to enhancing user productivity, enabling organizations to focus more on deriving insights and less on the intricacies of report design.
Microsoft Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Features and Benefits
Having discussed the Microsoft Power BI advantages, we will discuss specifically Power BI Pro advantages and Power BI Premium advantages along with their individual features.
Power BI Pro Version
Power BI Pro version is a fully paid, cloud-based, and self-service analytics tool. The Power BI Pro benefits are:
- It allows the building of dashboards, reports.
- Embed them into Apps.
- Share with users plus integrate with other Microsoft solutions.
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Power BI Premium version
Power BI Premium version can be regarded as the super upgradation for Power BI Pro and is best suited for big enterprises with many users. It offers all the features and functionalities of Power BI Pro. The additional Power BI Premium benefits include the following:
- Increased data capacity limits.
- Maximum performance.
- Flexibility to publish reports across the business without the need for any individual license per user.
- Greater scale and performance (instead of the shared capacity available in the Power BI).
- The advantage of maintaining BI assets on-premises with Power BI Report Server.
- Access to the latest features for embedded analytics, One API surface, and a consistent set of capabilities.
- Power BI Mobile Apps are available for iOS, Android, and Windows phones.
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The Components and Features of Power BI
Components of Power BI
1. Power Query
Power Query helps to discover, connect, combine, and refine data sources to meet your analysis need.
2. Power Pivot
Power pivot is a data modeling technique to create models and establish relationship calculations.
3. Power View
Power view helps to create interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals in Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Power BI that bring data to life.
4. Power Map
Power map is a 3-D data visualization tool.
5. Power BI Desktop
Power BI desktop helps to get everything easily under the same solution to develop BI and data analysis experience.
6. Power Q&A
Power Q&A is used to explore data in the fastest way to get an answer using natural language. For example, an answer to a question like what was the total sales last year?
Apart from these hundreds of data sources from files (like Excel, PDF, SharePoint Folder, XML), databases (like SQL Server Database, Oracle Database, IBM databases, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery), other Power BI databases, Azure data connections, various online services (like Dynamics 365, Salesforce Reports, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Facebook and others) can be connected into Power BI.
How To Use Microsoft Power Apps To Simplify Customer Communication
Power Apps is a group of applications, services, connectors, and data platforms, as well as allowing a rapid development environment to build customized applications suitable for any specific business needs. Power Apps quickly build custom business apps that connect to the stored data either in the underlying data platform (called Microsoft Dataverse) or in other online/on-premises data sources like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and more.
It is also a superb example of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows the creation of mobile or tablet apps (that can run on Android, IOS, and Windows) for internal business users. Power Apps can be integrated into Power BI reports using the Power Apps visual.
Here is an example of Power Apps to simplify customer communication:
The Challenge
Too many emails can cause work disruption, waste of time and man hours, or inefficiency in customers’ user base. Simplification of customer communication by delivering easy-to-use tools that drastically cut down on the number of emails required can be best done by Power Apps.
The Solution
Microsoft Forms, Power Automate, and SharePoint Online (all included with a subscription to Office 365) can simplify customer communications, especially when experiencing a problem. Just by sending only ONE email, all the required information to sort the issue out can be done by drastically cutting down on the back-and-forth emails that it takes to resolve issues.
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Conclusion
In conclusion, the benefits of Power BI extend far beyond conventional analytics tools, positioning it as an indispensable asset for businesses navigating the data-centric landscape of 2024. Each of the benefits discussed contributes to the platform's versatility, integration capabilities, and user-friendly features. By harnessing the power of Power BI, organizations can not only transform raw data into actionable insights but also foster innovation, drive sustainable growth, and navigate the complexities of an ever-evolving business environment. As we move forward, the role of Power BI in shaping the future of data analytics is set to become even more pivotal, offering a strategic advantage to organizations that embrace its capabilities. Last but not the least check out the trainings for Business Intelligence and Power BI.
