Power BI is a Business Intelligence and visualization tool for transforming data from various data sources into interactive dashboards and analytical reports. Power BI presents cloud-based services for interactive visualizations with a simple interface for end users to create accounts and dashboards.
Different versions of Power BI are used for other platforms such as Desktop, Service-based (SaaS), and Power BI mobile apps. It provides several software connectors and benefits for business intelligence.
In this blog, you will understand all the basic concepts and get a basic idea of using Power BI.
Power BI Tutorial for beginners
Before we dive deeper into the Power BI introduction, let’s glance at Business Intelligence (BI). It directs to taking raw data from a data source, transforming it into actionable data, and using it to create reports and informative graphics for data analysis.
Graphical representation of tabular data is known as data visualization. It allows the user to visualize important information through charts, graphs, KPIs, maps, etc., gaining valuable insights just by looking at them. Microsoft Power BI is a tool with business intelligence and data visualization functions.
Before we embark on this journey of learning the new BI technology called Microsoft Power BI, we need to understand some basics about it. We ask you to thoroughly explore this Power BI tutorial as it will serve as a building block for learning Power BI.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence manages the technology, software, and processes that collect raw business data and transform it into meaningful information. BI enables businesses to integrate different data sets and analyze them and present them in the form of visual insights.
Business Intelligence provides actionable insights and helps the business make tactical decisions to improve the customer base and create superior value and profits.
Custom visualizations, easy access to raw data, and cloud services are some of the many features Business Intelligence offers companies. Power BI provides all these features through various tools and services available in the market, and Microsoft Power BI is among the most preferred.
Why Power BI?
Power BI provides business reporting and analysis power by providing planners and decision makers with competitive intelligence. With Power BI, decision makers can acquire, edit and visualize data using artificial intelligence and make better decisions based on scenarios.
Some of the unique features provided by Power BI that give it an edge over other Business Intelligence tools are listed below:
” Power BI allows direct queries on datasets if they exceed a specific size limit. This saves the time required to load system data and perform operations.
” The tool’s machine learning feature helps users uncover valuable trends and predict the competitive market.
” Get frequent update notifications and have the latest version of Power BI Desktop and Power BI Report Server.
” Power BI enables users to utilize cutting-edge computing power with the latest algorithms and technologies.
” Its personalized dashboards allow users to access essential visualizations and information from multiple reports quickly.
” Alerts can be set on key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep users up-to-date on various metrics and measurements.
” MS Power BI makes navigating and processing complex data sets easy, so even a non-technical user can use reports and custom dashboards without spending much time learning the interface.
” Users get free business insights in Power BI Desktop; therefore, it is best for small businesses with fewer computing requirements.
” Live reports and dashboards update real-time as data comes in, allowing users to solve problems and find new opportunities quickly.
” Power BI automatically updates reports and dashboards uploaded to the service cloud whenever a dataset is updated.
” Power BI integrates easily with other Microsoft products and services, such as Cortana. Users can access charts and graphs directly using voice commands.
Power BI architecture
To better understand Power BI, we can divide the architecture into three parts or phases:
1. Data integration
We can import data from various data sources in multiple formats in Power BI. Power BI combines data (extracted) from different data sources and converts it into a standard format in the data integration step. After data is combined into Power BI, it is stored in a shared storage area known as a workspace.
2. Data processing
Once Power BI integrates and stores the data in a secure location, the raw data requires some processing. Several processing or cleaning operations, such as removing redundant values, transform the raw data. Later, we apply relevant business rules to the processed data, which change them according to our business needs. This transformed data is loaded into data warehouses. This completes the entire ETL process.
3. Presentation of data
In this last phase, the processed data is moved from the warehouse to Power BI platforms such as Power BI Desktop to create reports, dashboards, and scoreboards. Power BI offers a broad range of visualizations. We can also import our visualization from the marketplace. We can publish reports on the web or mobile applications from report development platforms and share them with other business users.
4. Power BI users
Power BI users are divided into four sections according to the purpose of using Power BI. These four users are analysts, business users, IT professionals, and developers. Let’s learn a little more about them.
5. Analysts
Analysts use Power BI to develop and study reports, dashboards, and data models to gain valuable insights. Power BI offers various data sources an analyst can extract, create a common dataset, and clean and prepare that data for reporting and analysis.
6. Corporate users
Business users are casual users who study the reports and dashboards available for sharing on the web or in the Power BI mobile app. Business users are constantly informed of the latest information, which helps them make important decisions quickly. They can also set alerts for any change or abnormality in the data (if it occurs).
7. IT professionals
IT professionals are primarily concerned with scalability, availability, and data security. They also centrally manage all Power BI services and users.
8. Developers
All technical work is the responsibility of the developers. Their crucial role is to create custom visuals for use in Power BI, embed Power BI in other applications, create reports, etc.
Power BI certification
Certification will add a symbol of excellence in a specific technology to your resume. It indicates that you have invested significant time and effort in learning the technology or skill set and have grabbed full benefit of it.
Additionally, certifications will help you achieve a substantial salary increase compared to a non-certified candidate. You can foresee a 30-70 percent increase in earnings if certified in a specific technology such as Business Intelligence. Below are some Power BI certifications that will help you advance in your career:
DA-100 Exam:
Microsoft executes the DA-100 exam for data analysis with Microsoft Power BI certification but does not deliver any training course to train for the exam. To pass the exam, you must thoroughly understand the basics of Power BI, its components, and how to connect data from different sources and visualize and run queries on other datasets.
Exam 70-778:
” Explore and visualize data with Microsoft Power BI.
” Exam 70-778 provides you to develop custom visualizations utilizing Power BI Desktop and Configure desktops.
” Deploy models to Power BI web applications using Power BI.
Conclusion
Power BI provides tools and benefits that make Business Analytics a relatively straightforward task. A non-technical user can perform complex analyses and create interactive dashboards and live reports to visualize any information.
As Microsoft is the global leader in cloud AI services, Power BI allows users to integrate with other services and Cortana to get real-time analytics through queries.
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