Do you know about Power BI?

Introduction to Power BI

Introduction:
Hello guys, here we are with the super series of Power BI articles and the following blog is the first part of the series. The complete series will be divided into various sub-parts where we will discuss the important features and other tutorials related to Power BI.

The blogs are going to be in a quite detailed manner which will be enough for you guys to learn Power BI and become a pro in it.

What is Power BI?
Power BI is a Microsoft-developed product and a market leader in the field of Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tools. It is widely a cloud-based platform.

There are hell lots of features in Power BI which make them different from other reporting platforms. Power BI is a user-friendly tool that offers awesome drag and drop features and self-service capabilities which make it easy to use and learn.

There are three main components of the Power BI platform:
1) Power BI Desktop (A desktop application)
2) Power BI Service (SaaS i.e. Software as a Service)
3) Power BI Mobile (For iOS and Android devices)

One of the plus features of Power Bi is that we can deploy Power BI on both on-premise and on-cloud platforms.

Why Power BI?
As we read what exactly Power BI is, now let’s understand why should we use Power BI?

Power BI is a huge platform where several kinds of services come under it.
1) One of the important services under Power BI is Power BI Services which is a cloud-based service that is used to view and share the dashboard with end-users or various stakeholders.
2) Power BI Desktop is the heart of the Power BI platform which is a reporting interface where all the query editing and reporting part takes place.
3) Also one another useful service is Power BI Embedded which uses the Azure cloud platform, and we can use it for Data analysis and various ETL processes.

Significant Features of Power BI
1) Using Power BI users can perform Real-time analysis by establishing connections to various data sources. Various data sources can be connected using Power BI. From static to live-streaming data can be used in Power BI.
2) Power BI provides custom visualizations for custom visuals irrespective of the variety of visuals provided by Power BI.
3) You can quickly search for essential and useful insights from the dataset using the Quick Insight option available in Power BI.
4) Attractive Dashboards and reports can be made using PBI.
5) For interactive insights generation platform has provided various filters to their users.
6) Some interesting stuff provided by Power BI is Navigation Pane and Natural Language Q&A box.
7) DAX functions and M language can be used to generate Power BI insights.
8) HTML 5.0, column store databases, cloud computing, mobile apps, etc. This helps Power BI to be on top and popular as it is constantly getting updated with the latest features.

Power BI Components
Till now we all know why Power BI is so powerful and why it is used by so many organizations. So now let’s see what are various Power BI components which are used widely are.

1) Power Query: This component provided by Power BI is used to access, search and transform data from various data sources.
2) Power Pivot: It provides tools to model data from the internal memory data source for analytics.
3) Power View: These components have various tools to represent data through various visuals which are used for visual analysis.
4) Power Map: It has abilities to represent spatial data in form of maps. The important advantage of Power BI is that we can use maps in different customized ways.
5) Power BI Desktop: Power BI Desktop is the heart of the entire Power BI platform. Its development tool for Power View, Power Query, and Power Pivot. You can import various data sources and perform visualization tasks.
6) Power Q&A: Using the Power Q&A option, you can search for your data and find insights by entering queries in a natural language format. It can understand your questions asked and answers them with relevant insights in form of various visualizations.
7) Power BI Service: The Power BI Service helps in sharing the workbooks and data views with other users. Even data refreshing can take place after regular intervals.
8) Power BI Mobile Apps: Business stakeholders can view and interact with the reports and dashboards published on a cloud service through mobile using Power BI Mobile Apps.

In the coming blog, we will discuss the Architecture for Power BI and continue with the core topics.

Happy Learning!!!