Data is the foundation of modern industries, and it is being generated at an unprecedented rate. This data can be used to understand customer behavior, product values, and market trends. With the help of data analytics tools like Microsoft Power BI, businesses can use this data to make better decisions and improve their bottom line.
Power BI is used by various industries from different sectors to improve data visualization and decision-making processes that eventually lead to profitability. So, let’s dive deep into the topic and try to understand ‘What is Microsoft Power BI?’ and how you can kick-start or upgrade your career as a Power BI Analyst.
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence (BI) tool that helps businesses visualize and analyze data. It is used by various industries from different sectors to improve decision-making processes and ultimately lead to profitability. In this blog, we will discuss what Microsoft Power BI is and how you can kick-start or upgrade your career as a Power BI analyst.
Check out this video to get a step closer to understanding Power BI:
Before going to our main topics, let’s briefly discuss the term ‘Business Intelligence.’
What is Power BI?
Power BI provides a scalable platform that helps the user to connect, visualize, and share the data with other users or stakeholders to gain deeper insights into the business. It is available in both free and paid versions.
The free version only offers Power BI tools like Power BI Desktop and Power Q&A to reports or dashboards. Whereas, Power BI pro comes with Power BI Service that provides live report sharing, Power View, and Power BI Apps which gives great help while working with your Power BI projects.
The source of the raw data can be Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, or a combination of both on-premises and cloud-based hybrid data warehouses. With Microsoft Power BI, users can analyze the data from different sources and share it with anyone using Power BI Service.
Microsoft Power BI architecture enables non-technical users to get actionable insights into their business data without spending much time and resources to learn about the system. Using charts and graphs, users can understand the current state of the business and the actions needed to improve it.
Uses of Power BI
Power BI is a popular business intelligence tool from Microsoft that has many useful applications. It allows users to visualize, analyze, and gain insights from their data. Some common ways that Power BI is used are as follows:
- Reporting: Power BI can help create interactive reports from various data sources. Reports can be customized visually and shared across devices. This makes it easy for teams to access up-to-date information.
- Dashboards: Key metrics and KPIs can be displayed on customizable dashboards in Power BI. Dashboards provide a high-level overview of business performance through colorful visuals like charts and indicators.
- Data Analysis: The tool supports advanced data modeling and DAX functions for deeper analysis. Users can slice, dice, and filter data to find patterns and relationships. This helps inform better decisions.
- Data Integration: Power BI integrates easily with various data sources like Excel, SQL Server, and cloud apps. It simplifies bringing different types of data together in one place for unified reporting and analysis.
- Sharing Insights: Once reports and dashboards are built, they can be published to the Power BI service for sharing. Decision-makers across departments can access live, interactive content on any device.
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Who Uses Power BI?
Power BI is used for Data Analytics by industries from different domains such as IT, healthcare, automobiles, space, e-commerce, finance, and more. They use different Power BI tools to create models and visualize the information with the help of custom dashboards and reports.
Let’s check out who uses Power BI and for what purpose do they fulfill with Power BI applications:
Cognizant – Vehicle 360 in Automobiles
Vehicle 360 provides analytics to various automotive enterprises, consumers, and fleet operators and helps them better understand vehicle performance, reduce operating and maintenance costs, and suggest optimum driving parameters.
Vehicle 360 is a cloud-based solution that provides real-time information about vehicle mileage, driving patterns, emissions, vehicle health, and performance through dashboards and custom visualizations.
Hitachi Solutions in Finance
Hitachi developed a solution using Power BI that connects banks directly to the cloud data sources so that decision-makers can understand business performance, analyze the pipeline, and make better decisions to increase profitability.
The retail banking solution uses intuitive virtualization techniques that allow users to quickly identify the elements that need timely attention.
RADACAD Labour Market Analysis – Government
RADCAD did a quarterly employment survey using the data from the state government and estimated the average hourly earnings of the labor market in New Zealand. The report aimed to provide the employment status of the people working in various industries in New Zealand. The report categorized industries into different groups based on employment status, like part-time, full-time, and contracts.
Overall, these examples show how the Power BI tool can be used to provide in-depth knowledge about real-world problems and make it easier for decision-makers to find the right solution to them and identify the areas that need more attention.
Real-Time Applications of Power BI
Power BI can be used for many real-time business applications by leveraging its data refresh capabilities. Some examples include:
- Sales and Operations Dashboards: Teams can track KPIs like orders, inventory levels, and production metrics in real-time to quickly address issues on the factory floor or sales floor.
- Customer Service Monitoring: Agents can access up-to-date customer data, support tickets, SLA compliance, and more while assisting customers.
- Supply Chain Visibility: Organizations get a live view of order fulfillment, shipments, and inventory movements across different supply chain stages.
- Marketing Campaign Analytics: Campaign performance metrics like website traffic, leads, and conversions are refreshed automatically so marketers can optimize ongoing campaigns.
- IoT Device Monitoring: Power BI integrates with IoT platforms to continuously visualize sensor data from connected products and assets for predictive maintenance.
- Financial Reporting: Accounting, budgeting, and other financial data can be refreshed each day or hour for the latest view in boardroom presentations.
Components of Power BI
Power BI consists of several key components that work together to deliver business intelligence capabilities. The main components of Power BI include:
- Power BI Desktop: This is a free desktop application used to connect to data sources, model and shape data, and build reports and dashboards. It provides a visual, drag-and-drop interface for designing reports.
- Power BI Service: Once reports and dashboards are created on the dDesktop, they can be published to the Power BI service. This is a cloud-based portal for sharing, viewing, and distributing content across an organization.
- Reports: Reports are visual, interactive pages created on the dDesktop for analyzing and exploring data. They can include charts, maps, cards, and other visualizations.
- Dashboards: Dashboards compile multiple reports and visuals onto a single screen to provide an overview of business performance through colorful tiles and widgets.
- Datasets: Datasets contain the underlying data models created in dDesktop by connecting to various sources and transforming the data for analysis.
- Gateways: On-premises data gateways allow Power BI to connect securely to on-premise data sources like SQL Server without having to migrate the data to the cloud.
- Apps: Power BI apps bring related reports and dashboards together in an integrated experience that can be embedded within portals and websites.
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Power BI Architecture
Power BI has a flexible architecture that allows for smooth data integration, analysis, and sharing capabilities. It can connect to a wide variety of data sources, both inside and outside an organization. This includes databases, cloud applications, files, and folders. The Power BI Desktop client is used to import data from these sources and build robust data models with transformations. Visual reports and interactive dashboards are then designed on top of these models.
Once completed, the content is published to the Power BI service, where it can be securely accessed by others. The service handles collaboration, distribution, and administration functions in the cloud. For on-premise data that cannot reside in the cloud, Power BI data gateways enable direct querying of sources like SQL Server without moving the data.
Overall, the architecture is centered around self-service business intelligence, with smooth data flows between sources, modeling, analysis, and reporting tools, and distribution through the service. This provides powerful and flexible functionality to organizations globally.
Advantages of Power BI
Affordability:
A major advantage of using Power BI is that it is inexpensive compared to other cloud service providers. The Power BI Desktop version is free of cost, you can download and start making the reports on your computer. However, if you wanna share your reports on the cloud you have to pay 9.99$ per user per month.
Excel Integration:
In Power BI, you can also save data to Excel. No matter how great the data is presented using Graphs, maps and charts using data visualization tools, people still tend to have the data in their excel sheet. For example, you can get the data of a manufacturing unit for the past six months within a few clicks from Power BI.
Custom Visualization:
Power BI offers a wide range of custom visualizations where developers can take your requirements and convert them to KPI’s, charts, graphs, maps etc.
Data Accessibility and Interactive visualization:
Power BI provides great access to all the data source and the data sets that you create while designing the reports, in a centralized location. You can access the data anytime, anywhere from any device multiple times. Users can interact with the dashboards using filters, highlighting features, etc. by simple clicks.
Newly Developed Features:
One of the other advantages is that Microsoft provides the users with monthly updates. Overall, Power BI is an amazing tool for data analysis and visualization. The pros far outbalance the drawbacks of Power BI.
Disadvantages of Power BI
The language used in Power BI is mostly DAX. However, there are only so many actions that can be performed using DAX Formula. It may allow you to create a multitude of custom calculations but it is not flexible and the query becomes cumbersome. The outcome of these cannot always be good for the dashboard performance or speed.
Power BI has a limit on the size of data that it can ingest. If you wish to import data larger than 2GB you need to extend your free version to the paid version. And using Power BI can be frustrating at times as it can crash while processing large datasets with complex measures.
Table Relationships:
Another con is that Power BI can have difficulty in handling data with complex relationships between tables. You need to create data models carefully with unique fields so that Power BI can distinguish the relationship with the appropriate table.
User Interface:
Power BI has a cramped and bulky interface, as it is filled with many icon options that block the view of the reports and dashboards. Moreover the Tooltip in Power BI has a limited application.
Compatibility with IOS:
Power BI does not provide a compatible option in the Desktop version for Mac Users.
Limitation in Excel Integration:
Even though the excel integration is an advantage of Power BI, you can only download data upto 150,000 rows.
What versions of Power BI are available?
Choosing the right version of Power BI depends on your specific needs and budget. If you’re just starting with Power BI or want a free option for personal use, Power BI Desktop is a great choice. Here are some versions of Power BI that are defined below:
- Power BI Desktop: This free application allows users to build reports, and dashboards and visualize data locally on their desktops. It’s suitable for individual analysis and exploration.
- Power BI Pro: For sharing content online and collaborating, a Power BI Pro subscription provides publishing reports to the cloud-based Power BI service. It enables teamwork and has advanced features.
- Power BI Premium: Large organizations with high-volume data need to benefit from Premium’s dedicated cloud hardware, ensuring fast performance. It offers robust data storage and refreshes, along with paginated reports.
- Power BI Premium Per User: Similar to Power BI Premium, this version is licensed on a per-user basis, making it a cost-effective choice for smaller teams requiring Premium’s capabilities without the need for a dedicated capacity.
- Power BI Report Server: For businesses wanting an on-premise solution, the Report Server allows hosting Power BI content on their private servers with more control over data security and access.
Power BI Certifications
A certification puts a stamp of excellence on your portfolio in a particular technology. It shows that you have invested a substantial amount of time and effort in learning the technology or skill set and made full use of it.
Moreover, certifications help you get a substantial increase in pay as compared to a non-certified candidate. You can expect a 30–70 percent rise in your income if you are certified in a specific technology like Business Intelligence. Below are the certifications that will help you go up in your BI career:
Exam DA-100:
Microsoft conducts the DA-100 Exam for Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI certification, but it does not provide any training course to prepare for the examination. To clear the exam, you are expected to have in-depth knowledge of the fundamentals of Power BI, its components, how to connect data from different sources, visualizations, and running queries on different datasets.
Exam 70-778
Exam 70-778 for Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power BI equips you for creating custom visualizations using Power BI Desktop, configuring the desktop, and deploying models on the Power BI website and applications using Power BI Service.
However, the 70-778 Exam is retired on January 30, 2021, by Microsoft and will be replaced by a similar examination with some add-on features. You can also try this exam once it is issued.
Power BI Career Opportunities
As business operations are getting more complex with an increased user base and data generation, companies are now using Business Intelligence tools for real-time data visualization and making better market decisions.
MS Power BI has emerged as the leader in Business Analytics used by many multinational companies and firms. Plus, the technology is fairly new, which means that the demand for skilled BI Analysts is very high. So, if you are thinking to start or switch your career to Business intelligence, now is the right time.
With good knowledge of Power BI and related terminology, you can apply for different job roles as listed below:
What is Power BI Developer?
A Power BI Developer is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining BI solutions and executing queries as per requirements. The professional also develops and updates technical documentation as per the business requirements.
He/she knows the complete BI system and the in-and-out of the queries requested by users. To fulfill all these roles, he/she should have extensive knowledge of operating systems, databases, networking, cloud architecture, and of course, Business Intelligence.
What is a Power BI Analyst?
A BI Analyst gathers business data through various techniques like data mining, looks for trends, and picturizes the company’s competitiveness with other players in the market. Also, a Power BI Analyst looks for the features added in Power BI’s latest version and finds out the way it can be used for the business.
Based on user requirements, the Business Analyst creates reports so that the decision-makers can make better decisions and increase the profitability of the company.
What is Power BI Consultant?
A Power BI Consultant evaluates the existing systems and installs new ones if necessary. The person is also responsible for balancing customer requirements with technical constraints and developing a high-level roadmap to achieve the goals.
What is Power BI Manager?
BI Managers are professionals with years of experience as a Power BI Analyst or Power BI Developer. They drive the data strategy and manage various operations of the BI team.
A BI Manager helps decision-makers and stakeholders understand the current situation of the business via dashboards and custom reports so that they can make data-informed decisions.
Let’s now talk about the certifications that you can earn to become a successful Power BI Analyst.
Conclusion
Power BI provides many tools and services that make Business Analytics a fairly easy task. Even a non-technical user can perform complex analysis and build interactive dashboards and live reports to visualize any information.
As Microsoft is a global leader in Cloud AI services, Power BI allows users to integrate with other services and Cortana and get real-time analysis with the help of queries.