Topic: -POWERBI

DATE :04-07-24
Name : Aishwarya Taral
What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence (BI) platform that provides nontechnical

business users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data. Power BI's
user interface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with Excel, and its deep integration with
other Microsoft products makes it a versatile self-service tool that requires little upfront
training.

Users can download Power BI for Windows 10 or Windows 11, called Power BI Desktop,
and native mobile apps for Windows, Android and Apple iOS devices. There is also Power
BI Report Server for companies that must maintain their data and reports on premises. That
version of Power BI requires a special version of the desktop app -- aptly called Power BI
Desktop for Power BI Report Server.

What is Power BI used for?

Microsoft Power BI is used to find insights within an organization's data. It can help connect
disparate data sets, transform and clean the data into a data model and create charts or graphs
to provide visuals of the data. All of this can be shared with other Power BI users within the
organization.
Data models created from Power BI can be used in several ways, including the following:
 Telling stories through charts and data visualizations.
 Examining what-if scenarios within the data.
 Creating reports that answer questions in real time and help with forecasting to make
sure departments meet business metrics.
Power BI also provides executive dashboards for administrators and managers, giving
management more insight into how departments are doing.

What are the advantages of Power BI?

Multiple advantages make Power BI an attractive option for businesses looking to explore
their data through BI visualizations, patterns and insights. These include the following:
 Accessibility. Both nontechnical and technical audiences can easily use Power BI. Its
range of pricing options makes it available to businesses with smaller budgets as well
as larger enterprises.
 Integrations. Power BI's ability to integrate with software such as Excel and other
Microsoft applications means it can work with data from various sources.
 Customer support. Microsoft offers customer support for those in need
of troubleshooting and assistance.
 Customization. The ability to create custom visuals adds value for businesses looking
to capture and visualize important relationships or patterns found in complex data sets.

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  Collaboration. Power BI is built to facilitate collaboration, for example, among
different teams within an organization.
 Scalability. Power BI can support large-scale data sets, making it suitable for
enterprises as well as small businesses.

What are the disadvantages of Power BI?

While the benefits of the platform appear enticing, there are nonetheless caveats for business
users to be aware of, as there are no perfect BI tools in existence yet. They include the
following:
 Pricing tiers. While the free, Pro and Premium plans offer the essential
capabilities for data reporting and analytics, the free version has a minimum number
of features.
 Resource-intensive. Running the platform using an organization's existing
infrastructure can consume compute and other resources faster than some
organizations can tolerate.
 Dense or cluttered user interfaces. User-friendliness doesn't necessarily equate to
neat dashboards as there are many visual components that appear cluttered.
 Vast amounts of features. Analytics and reporting can be done with easy-to-use
basic features, but Power BI offers quite a few other features that are more
complicated. For example, application programming interfaces (APIs) require
complex knowledge and technical expertise.
 Complex table relationships. Power BI can take a few data tables and quickly find
relationships among data points, but introducing more tables increases the risk of
inaccuracies and slow processing times.

What are key features of Power BI?

Microsoft has added several data analytics features to Power BI since its inception and
continues to do so. Some of the most important features include the following:
 Artificial intelligence. Users can access AI-powered image recognition and text
analytics in Power BI. They can also create machine learning models using automated
capabilities and integrate with Azure Machine Learning. Power BI's Q&A
functionality allows users to ask questions and receive responses about data through
natural language processing, a branch of AI associated with chatbots. Also, Microsoft
is in the process of integrating Copilot, its AI-powered chatbot, into Power BI, giving
users the ability to ask questions about data and create custom reports.
 Hybrid deployment support. This feature provides built-in connectors that allow
Power BI tools to connect with a number of different data sources from
Microsoft, Salesforce and other vendors.

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  Quick Insights. This feature allows users to create subsets of data and automatically
apply analytics to that information.
 Common data model support. Support for the common data model lets Power BI
use a standardized and extensible collection of data schemas, including entities,
attributes and relationships.
 Customization. This feature allows developers to change the appearance of default
visualization and reporting tools and import new tools into the platform.
 APIs for integration. Developers use sample code and APIs to embed the Power BI
dashboard in other software products.
 Self-service data prep. Using Power Query, business analysts can ingest, transform,
integrate and enrich big data into the Power BI web service. Ingested data can be
shared across multiple Power BI models, reports and dashboards.
 Modelling view. Users can divide complex data models by subject area into separate
diagrams, select multiple objects, set common properties, view and modify properties
in the properties pane, and set display folders for simpler consumption of complex
data models.

Power BI components

Microsoft Power BI connects data sources and provides BI reports and dashboards to users.
It can connect with just an Excel spreadsheet or bring together cloud-based and on-
premises data warehouses. Data pulled from cloud-based sources, such as Salesforce CRM,
is automatically refreshed.
With applications such as an Excel workbook and Power BI Desktop file connected to online
or on-premises data sources, Power BI users must manually refresh or set up a refresh
schedule to ensure Power BI reports and dashboards use the most current data available.
Power BI consists of a collection of apps and can be used on a desktop, as a software as a
service (SaaS) product or on a mobile device. Power BI Desktop is the on-premises version,
Power BI service is the cloud-based SaaS offering and mobile Power BI runs on mobile
devices.

The following are among the different Power BI components that let users create and share
business insights in ways that fit their roles:
 Power Query. This data mashup and transformation tool integrates data from
multiple sources.
 Power Pivot. This is a memory tabular data modelling tool.
 Power View. This tool lets users create and interact with their own data
visualizations.
 Power Map. Power Map is a visualization tool for 3D geospatial data that bolsters
predictive analytics.
 Power BI Q&A. This natural language query engine can take user inputs and produce
data visualization outputs.

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  Power BI Embedded. This tool lets users take customer-facing reports, insights,
visuals and other items from Power BI and embed them into other apps or
websites.
There are dozens of data sources that connect into Power BI. These include the following:

 Files such as Excel, PDF, SharePoint or XML.

 Databases, including Amazon Redshift, Google Big Query, IBM databases, Microsoft
SQL Server and Oracle Database.
 Other data sets within the Power BI platform can be connected and Microsoft Azure
can be integrated with Power BI to serve as a source.
 Online services, including Adobe Analytics, Facebook, Google Analytics, Microsoft
Dynamics 365 and Salesforce Reports

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