Power BI

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what’s important,

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform that provides nontechnical business users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data.

Data is the lifeblood of modern businesses, and we’re generating more of it than ever. But amassing mountains of digital information isn’t much use unless organizations are able to make sense of it. That’s where business intelligence software comes in.

Power BI is built on the foundation of Microsoft Excel, and as such, the learning curve from Excel to Power BI is not that steep; anyone who can use Excel can use Power BI, but the latter is far more powerful than its spreadsheet counterpart.

Advantges of using Power BI

• Businesses can input huge quantities of data into Power BI that many other platforms would struggle to process
• Information can be visualized using powerful templates and allows business to make better understandings of data
• Power BI is easy to use. It’s basically Excel pivot tables with Excel’s data visualization tools taken to the next level. Once you get data into a Power BI dataset, making charts, graphs, and tables that make sense of the data is not that complex. Anyone with average Excel skills can figure it out.
• Power BI connects to hundreds of data sources. Power BI can read data from Microsoft Excel and text files like XML and JSON. Power BI connects to SQL server and other databases. It can read data stored in the cloud, from Azure sources, and from online services like Google Analytics and Facebook.
• it provides robust access control and security by setting it up through the Active Directory. Admins can also control which team members have access to specific rows of data on reports depending on the employee’s position.

Components of Power BI

• Power Query: a data connection tool that lets you transform, combine, and enhance data from several sources
• Power Pivot: a data modeling tool for creating data models
• Power View: a data visualization tool that generates interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals
• Power Map: another visualization tool for creating immersive 3D visuals

Power BI Versions

• Power BI Desktop:Also known as Power BI Free, Power BI Desktop is a free desktop application you can install right on your own computer. Power BI Free is included in all Office 365 Plans
• Power BI Service:Power BI Service is the full version of Power BI, and is hosted on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. There are two ways to license Power BI Service; Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium.
  

  Power BI Pro: Power BI Pro isn’t hugely different to Power BI Desktop. They have the same visualization options, the same limits on storage and file upload size, and the same report refresh allowance. The key difference is that with Pro, you can share your data, reports, and dashboards with others privately—provided they also have a Power BI Pro license.

  Power BI Premium: Premium is intended for enterprise-level businesses that generate huge amounts of data, and require extensive access to the app.

• Power BI Report Server:eport Server allows users to take advantage of Power BI on-premise. For some businesses, uploading their data to the cloud isn’t an option. This could be because there are data regulation laws applying to their particular industry, or maybe they don’t have the necessary infrastructure or connectivity where they are to be able to reliably access SaaS platforms.

Power BI Limitations:

• Power BI has a limit on the amount of data it can ingest, about 2GB. After the data hit the limit, you have to upgrade to the paid version of Power BI.
• Power BI is fairly rigid in how it handles relationships between tables. It does not like it when there are two ways to join a pair of tables. In some cases, you have to make unique fields in tables specifically for the purpose of joining tables together.