Best features of Power BI
Table of Contents
Power BI is a leading analytics and visualization tools and has many features which allow it to be the best business intelligence tool. Furthermore, the Power BI technology enhances the Business Intelligence by bridging the gap between data and insights.
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence software package that includes software services, applications, and data connectors. It’s a cloud-based platform for combining data from several sources into a unified collection. These data sets are used to create sharable reports, dashboards, and applications for data visualization, assessment, and analysis. Power BI Desktop (a desktop programme), Power BI Service (SaaS, or Software as a Service), and Power BI Mobile are the three types of Power BI platforms offered by Microsoft (for iOS and Android devices).
Power BI may be installed on-premises or in the cloud. It may also import data from local databases, cloud-based databases, big data sources, basic Excel files, and other hybrid sources.
Best Features of Power BI
There are various components which build complete Power BI architecture. Below mentioned are the features which help Power BI to be the one of the leading tool In business intelligence industry.
Attractive Visualizations
You cannot present raw data in excel sheet or any other format to your stakeholder. It would be too difficult for you to present as well as for them to interpret. Visualizations here can make the entire scenario easy for you and for your stakeholder as well. In Visualization you can add charts and graphs according to the requirement of your data and can show off your insights. There is also a library available for custom visualizations. You can add various chart like donut chart, tree map chart, funnel chart, clustered bar chart, stacked bar chart, line chart, ribbon chart, waterfall chart, scatter chart, pie chart and many more
Get Data Source
Nowadays, any organizations data could be stored on multiple platforms. To generate a report, it is important to integrate all this data. Power BI allows you to import data from multiple platforms, which can be from on-premise to cloud based. The Get data is a powerful feature and will allow you to import your data from excel, power bi datasets, power bi data flows, sql servers, MySQL databases, Azure, Oracles, Pdfs and many more. Whether the data is structured or unstructured you can import it easily.
Customizable dashboards
Dashboards helps us to visualize insights from data and take meaningful decisions. Dashboards are generally single page of file and multiple pages can be created in a single file. Which also means multiple dashboards can be created in a single file. Dashboards can be shared as well as printed.
Flexible tiles
Dashboard is generally made up of several graphs and charts or visualizations. One particular graph or chart is called a tile. We can arrange this till wherever and however we want. We can then put other tiles around it as per our needs. Tiles segregate each information and provide a better visual. Size of tiles can also be changed easily as per convenience.
Datasets Filtration
When different data are extracted from different data sources and merged together, we get a dataset. A dataset can be a data extracted from multiple sources or a data extracted from a single source like Microsoft excel. These datasets can be sued to create visualizations as they are kind of complete in nature. These datasets can be filtered in smaller parts or subsets to maintain relevancy of the requirement.
Natural Language Q&A question box
This is one of the most unique features in Power BI. With this feature user can ask a question in natural language for data available in Power Bi system. The cognitive engines of power bi will then search for visualization or dataset regarding which the user has asked question. Once the system finds the answer it will return the answer back to the user. The cognitive technology of Power BI is really powerful and allows us to communicate with the system using our human language.
DAX Data Analysis Function
There are around 250 functions in Power BI library which could be used to perform calculations on data. DAX here stands for Data Analysis Expressions. It is a group of operator and functions that can be used to build formulas and expressions in power bi. There are many functions in DAX but let’s enlist some of them here
- Aggregation functions – These functions help us to perform calculations like sum, average, count, minimum and maximum.
- Financial functions – These functions are used when there is need of any kind of financial calculation. For e.g. – Calculating rate of return and net present value.
- Parent and Child functions – These functions help to manage data that are present in the form of parent/child hierarchy.
- Statistical functions – These functions perform statistical or probability-based calculations like number of permutations and standard deviation.
- Relationship functions – These functions are used to manage relationships between tables. For e.g – it can specify cross-filtering direction to be used in calculation for columns that are in particular relationship.
- Text functions – With these functions you can operate on strings. For e.g you can search for a text within a string or you can concatenate two string values.
- Logical functions – These function return information about values in any expression. For e.g. true functions allow you to check whether the expression you are evaluating returns a TRUE value or not.
There are many other functions’ blank function (returns a blank) or error function (raises error in case any issue) which don’t fall under any category but are important.
Office 365 Launcher
Office 365 is a very popular application suite and is easy to use. You can easily launch Office 365 in Power BI and make use of their simple interface.
Power BI is developed by Microsoft which is industry leader in many verticals. This robust tool has really acquired good portion of market since it was launched in 2013, and nowadays is mentioned as a required skill in many job descriptions. That being the reason learning Power BI is really important. There are many features in Power BI, but all the features couldn’t be explained in this article.