Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics tool provided by Microsoft, to enable businesses to create interactive visualisations and representation of their data from different data sources. This helps break down and simplify data into a visual report or dashboard. This tool also provides business intelligence capabilities, where data can be transformed and manipulated.
Visual reports make it easier and quicker to spot and analyse data trends monthly, quarterly, annually or against any time variation. These insights can then be shared in organisations as PDF documents or can be embedded in your company website or app via a code that is generated on Microsoft Power BI.
Microsoft Power BI connects to your available data sources such as files and databases.
Files: These are Excel sheets in (.xlsx) formats, comma-separated value (.csv) or Power BI Desktop file (.pbix). These can be imported and loaded to a data model.
Content Packs: These are reporting services such as Google Analytics and Salesforce. These are services that require you to have an account and Power BI connects to them via APIs.
Databases: These include databases in the Cloud such as Azure SQL databases.
Of course, we should also mention that it is important to double check if Power BI is connected to the correct data source, account or property.
Why Power BI?
When you have a tool that offers incredible cloud-based features, role level security features, and intuitive user experience features. Microsoft Power BI is also a tool that gets updated often, which helps continuously improve user experience and data interaction features.
Another reason to be in favour of using Microsoft Power BI is affordability. The tool is free, if you are going to use it to build your own dashboards. You can upgrade to paid versions like the Share and Collaborate package, which have more features.
There is no questioning the credibility of this tool, coming from Microsoft, it allows the tool to be integrated with Microsoft’s other products such as Microsoft Excel, Office 356, SQL Server and Azure.
The main reason we would suggest Microsoft Power BI to is because of its great report visualisation capabilities. With a large variety of chart visualisations to choose from, it allows you to represent data in many formats, quickly and beautifully.
What are the limitations?
Like all other data tools out there, Microsoft Power BI also has its limitations. The first one being that you must know and understand Excel. The tool is not very easy to use, you would have to watch a few tutorials to understand the functionality. The complexity of the tool would require some level of understanding of how each component links from the tool.
It can also struggle with handling very large data sources and can experience time outs when connecting to large data imports.
In Conclusion
Though this tool does have some limitations, it’s still great for report dashboards and visualisations.
If you’re worried about the complexity of this tool, it is good to note that you can contact our Quant Marketing data team for the best Microsoft Power BI reports and dashboards for all kinds of digital business data.
Article Author : Ntokozo Dlamini
