Power BI is Microsoft’s immersive business intelligence data visualization and analytics platform (BI). You can use it to extract data from a wide variety of cloud and on-site applications to create dashboards that display the metrics you care about the most, or dig in and ask questions about the data (literally). You can build rich reports or embed dashboards and reports into portals of reporting that you already use. Also, you can create dashboards, surveys, and visualizations that go way beyond bar and pie charts, but to use them, you don’t need to be a designer. Here’s how to get more insights, in more fields than you might think, from the data you already have.
1. Visualizing the programs
For hundreds of data services, applications, and services that provide pre-set reports and visualizations, Power BI has hundreds of content sets, models, and integrations, and not just Microsoft ones like Dynamics 365 and SQL Server.
If you use Xero for accounting, or K2 Cloud for designing business processes, or Adobe Marketing Cloud, SAP HANA, Salesforce, etc. Moreover, MailChimp, Marketo or Google Analytics, or even GitHub, you can use Power BI to visualize, monitor against. And put together in a personalized dashboard the data you have in those services. The on-site portal can also be set up to use Power BI to explore data sets on your own servers. You may equate website visits with purchases in this manner, or see what deals have drawn new customers in. You can generate your own reports and visualizations, execute measurements. Then you can set access thresholds for specific users. Power BI calls these measured measures.
2. Using your data to tell stories
Charts are perfect for numbers, but use the latest Timeline Storyteller custom visual for Power BI if you want to display data that evolves over time in a way that is easy to interpret. You can create a linear chart of dates or periods, or set them out in triangles, spirals, grids, or custom forms. You may also present a list of chronologies, a sequence displaying the length of occurrences, or choose relative or logarithmic scales. Choose how to better reflect, scale and set out the details, and Power BI can create a timeline from it; use it to tell your company’s past, illustrate how demand is growing, or clarify something else that counts in the sequence of events.
3. ‘What-ifs’ to discuss
In Excel, you can compare multiple situations, but this tool helps you to do so by dragging a slider bar to display improvements. Add a measured metric for a statistic such as sales and you can add parameters that change in your What-if scenario by specifying the data form, minimum, limit, and increments using the New Parameter button in Power BI Desktop. This generates a measured metric that can be referenced in other calculated measures; then you can plug that into a formula that you build to show how many customer service tickets you can plan to have to deal with if you create a What-if parameter for the number of customers who respond to a specific promotion.
4. Ask real-time questions
Using the natural language features of this platform instead of creating maps and reports to raise questions and get displays in response. You should decide how the information is displayed, ask for “total sales by region per month as a line” or let Power BI choose a layout. That fits the details for a more general question such as “what were the last quarter sales numbers?
Q&A will recommend those as questions if there are tiles pinned to the dashboard, and as you type a comment, it will suggest words you might include depending on the tables in the data collection. You can pin the visualization to the dashboard if the query turns out to be incredibly helpful, making this a simple way to construct visualizations for data collection. You can also apply featured questions to the dashboard settings if you own a data package. Q&A uses the names of rows, columns, and measured fields in the data sets; you will need to query for “sales by area” if the column is named area rather than zone unless you add synonyms, and table names like Consumer Overview.
The Power BI website and the iOS app work with Power BI Q&A. It can operate on data stored in an Excel table (or, if you allow Q&A for the data set, in a database through the on-premises gateway) or you can use Power Pivot to customize the Q&A data set. Make sure that all tables in your data set are properly united, search the data types for dates and numbers. And build the default column fieldset and the default column mark for tables to tweak the displayed columns and show the form of a Q&A graph or map.
5. Tailored visualizations
A wide selection of visualizations are included in Power BI and you can add more, either by installing them from the Office Store or making your own using the custom Visual Tool open source (which uses CSS, TypeScript, and NodeJS). The Office Store provides Microsoft visualizations, such as word clouds, an R script-based correlation map, chord maps. This displays interrelationships in a circular matrix, the “box, and whisker plot”. It shows outliers, clusters, and percentiles to show statistics that may otherwise be overlooked in summarized figures. Such as ratios, as well as other Power BI consumer visualizations.
To use these as custom graphics, you can also connect Visio diagrams to Power BI if you want to evaluate progress across workflows and processes. If you have Excel analytics templates, you can transform them into custom Power BI presentations using Frontline’s Analytic Solver without having to build a custom JavaScript visual. What you get isn’t a static report; you can drag and drop different Power BI data sets onto a dynamic model to simulate or refine various choices.
6. Fit more details into the dashboards of executives
In their visualizations, multiple BI users require different levels of knowledge. Managers and market analysts may like a lot of statistics, but if the managers track 20 or 30 main indicators, maybe for several regions around the globe, it is easier to provide it with a clear view at a glance that shows the objective and the real figure rather than a more detailed visualization. That way, in a meeting, you can easily look up facts without being stuck in too many charts and statistics. Different report forms are merged into a single tile by the Power KPI custom visualization.
7. For IT info, Power BI
It’s not just enterprise customers who need to distribute vast volumes of data for insight; you should use Power BI to visualize information for IT reporting tools. Azure Behavior Logs’ Power BI solution template uses an Azure SQL database and Stream Analytics to capture and view logs using pre-built Power BI Desktop reports. So you can look at consumption and problem patterns. For the Intune Data Warehouse, there is also a series of pre-built Power BI reports that display app information. Such as settings and compliance status, and a System Center Configuration Manager solution design with a dashboard that covers client and server health.
Conclusion
Power BI is highly flexible, with dashboards and interfaces that can be customized by users. It is also quick to make personalized reports. With our rich catalog of fully-customizable, open-source visualizations of data, imagine data your way. You can produce beautiful visualizations with the custom graphics SDK, based on well-known JavaScript libraries. Such as D3, jQuery, and also R programming language scripts. You can also use this by learning through Power BI online training.
