Introduction to Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics tool that allows individuals to build attractive data visualizations. These visualizations can be displayed in interactive dashboards, allowing users to sort and filter data. As such, decision-makers can dive as deep into the data as they’d like or simply look at the big picture information required to refine organizational goals, strategy, and operations. 

Power BI is compatible with Excel. In fact, users can pull information directly from Excel into Power BI for visualization. Thus, anyone who has had success using Excel in the past can benefit from learning Power BI. However, keep in mind that visualization in Power BI is a bit more involved than in Excel, so don’t be discouraged if it takes a bit more time to learn. 

Power BI Products

There are three main versions of Power BI: Power BI Desktop, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium. Power BI Desktop is the free version of this product. Individuals can install this product onto any computer and then access the program’s basic features. This includes connecting to different data sources, performing data analysis, publishing results online, and exporting data back to Excel. 

The downside to using the free version of Power BI is that you can’t share reports with individuals who don’t have Power BI Pro. The free version of this product best serves individuals using Power BI for personal use or those who don’t necessarily plan to share their visualizations with others. This product is sold by the license (that is, each person in an organization who would like to use Power BI Pro must have an individual license). The price per license is $10 per user. 

Power BI Pro includes the same features as Power BI Desktop, with the bonus of being able to share reports with others. Power BI Pro users can also embed their visualizations in other apps, including Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. Users can also create workspaces to easily collaborate with others in their organization by creating a shared space to collect their visualizations, dashboards, and reports. 

Finally, Power BI Premium is the most comprehensive product offered by Microsoft. This product enables as many users as you want to view the content, including people outside of your organization (though not everyone can create content itself). Individuals who will be creating content still need to have a Power BI Pro license. 

Features of Power BI

Several key features make Power BI such a popular data analytics and visualization tool. In particular, it allows users to pull information from multiple data sources. In doing so, individuals can clean, synthesize, and visualize data all in one place, allowing them to draw conclusions by looking at an operation as a whole rather than its individual parts. 

Additionally, Power BI is secure, so individuals don’t need to worry about protecting sensitive information, though everyone should always do their due diligence to ensure their data is safe. Power BI also updates in real-time. In other words, when individuals make changes to datasets, their information is quickly updated in any dashboards or other visualizations they’ve created. 

Power BI makes it easy for individuals to share reports with other colleagues. These attractive reports can be used to display important information that can then be used for future decision-making. Power BI also includes data visualization templates within its program, so individuals can choose from some of these to begin their visualization process, rather than starting from absolute scratch. 

Who Uses Power BI? 

Power BI is useful for a wide variety of careers. In particular, professionals who deal with large amounts of data, including Data Scientists and Data Analysts, can use this product to sort, analyze, and visualize data. This enables these roles to share findings with other individuals in an attractive format quickly. Likewise, Data Scientists and Data Analysts don’t need to manually refresh data since Power BI automatically updates visualizations as datasets change. 

Due to its analytical tools, Power BI is also useful for individuals who work as Business Analysts. Using Power BI, Business Analysts can create data dashboards with information about their organization’s sales and financial performance. Similarly, Business Analysts can analyze and visualize data about parts of their organizational operations, enabling them to identify areas for improvement. Power BI can also be helpful when it comes to forecasting projected growth or other financial information. 

In particular, Power BI is beneficial to any organization that uses data to make decisions about its day-to-day operations. This includes departments like sales, human resources, and marketing, to name a few. For example, a Human Resources Generalist might use Power BI to capture things like: 

• The current number of vacancies in an organization 
• Average time to hire in a recruitment cycle 
• Turnover rate within the organization 

This information can then be shared with organizational leaders in interactive data dashboards, allowing decision-makers to quickly grasp a situation without diving into the weeds. 

Learn Power BI

Due to Power BI’s versatility and popularity in scientific, business, government, and other sectors, learning how to use this product enables individuals to step up their professional skills. One of the best ways to learn Power BI is by practicing in a hands-on course setting. Numerous schools, including NYIM, offer Power BI courses that provide students the opportunity to learn this Microsoft tool. 

In particular, NYIM has a Power BI Bootcamp available in New York City or live online. Class sizes for this course are kept small to enable students to collaborate with one another easily and receive individualized support from instructors. The course meets for a total of 12 hours and costs $499. 

This Power BI Bootcamp teaches students to use measures like SUM, COUNT, and MAX and use Power BI’s DAX language. Students also learn to query data using Power Query and connect datasets to Power BI. In doing so, students learn how to analyze and visualize data with Power BI.