Exploring Data through Power BI
Businesses are in a hurry to get things done to stay ahead of the curve. To just do that and help businesses move from hard copy of reports, Microsoft has launched Microsoft Power BI and thereby shifting the focus from IT to the end user. One always needs interactive reports without the programming part of it. And Microsoft Power BI, is one such powerful application with a lot of features. You can create your reports in Power BI Desktop and share them with others on the Power BI Service. Like all Microsoft products, Power BI has several products including:
- Power BI Desktop: This is used to create reports by installing a Windows application on your device
- Power BI Service: Is a cloud service to share reports with your team
- Power BI Premium: Enterprise solution to licence BI instead of per user
- Power BI Mobile: A solution for Android/ iOS mobile phones and tablets
- Power BI Embedded: This allows to build and share applications with users who don’t have access to BI
- Power BI Report Server: This is an on-premise reporting infrastructure for creating/ publishing and distributing Power BI reports.
The key components of Power BI include
- Reports : For any successful business, reports are the source of making decisions. Now reports can be in form of charts, graphs, maps and other graphical representations. And a report in BI can pull data from only one dataset.
- Dashboards: This is a collection of visual(s) from a report. Great for decision makers, top management to have a bird’s eye representation.
- Workbooks: Much like excel files for datasets.
- Datasets: These are collection of data from multiple database tables.
- Workspaces: This helps in creating a dashboard from the areas in the Power BI service that gives space to organise and work
Power BI is supported on Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari Mac and Firefox desktop. If you have a great idea, you can request a free consultation here.