Microsoft Power BI
What is it?
Power BI is an innovative and practical tool from Microsoft for creating reports and for modeling, preparing and visualizing data.
This powerful tool for Business Intelligence (BI) lets you design personalized executive dashboards for KPI’s reporting, allowing you to better visualize the situation and every detail of the desired indicators.
The dashboards created with Power BI, in addition to being graphically attractive, are also characterized by being easily manageable by any member of the team without having to be an expert using the tool, this has allowed it to gain more and more popularity among businessmen and executives from all sectors.
This tool not only offers advantages for dashboard viewers, but also for its developers. Power BI includes a library of more than 120 connectors in its free version, which allows you to connect very quickly with data sources such as Azure SQL Database, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Excel, SharePoint, among many others, you can even use social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn as data sources to analyze the behavior of your publications. This specific feature allows any Data Analyst with or without programming experience to consult data from different sources with Microsoft or external technology, and create complex dashboards capable of being updated with a single click.
Data collection and analysis can become a big problem for companies that still manage their Dashboards in tools like Excel. This does not happen with Power BI, since, being directly connected to the data source, the ease with which its dashboards can be updated allows companies to save a lot of time and resources in data capture and analysis.
In short, the main goal of Microsoft Power BI is to create dynamic, custom, and easily updatable scorecards, using data from different sources. In addition, this tool contains built-in connectors for linking, querying, and acquiring a large number of data sources.
Today a wide range of options for information visualization and analysis is available in the market, however, Power BI is positioned as one of the most practical, complete and with the best cost-benefit ratio.
How does it add value to the organization?
The main benefit of using Power BI within an organization is the ability to visualize the entire operation or behavior in one place and in real time, giving the organization’s leaders an important competitive advantage by being able to make decisions in a accurate, timely and efficient.
On the other hand, the ease of updating information with a single click allows organizations to save a great deal of time and resources in data capture and analysis, thus also avoiding late updates or poor reaction capacity.
Power BI also contains some tools for predictive data analysis, thus giving the opportunity to anticipate future events or behavior and make adjustments to the operation before unwanted events occur.
Last but not least, the dashboards created in this tool can be viewed on practically any device and can be adapted to the screen of a laptop, tablet or smartphone and without the need to have the Power BI application installed, since the reports created are published in the cloud and shared only with selected users.
Licensing
Although at first glance it seems that the Power BI license is expensive, but in fact, the benefits of the tool are so many that it is worth much more than what is paid for it.
In its free version, Power BI allows the use of more than 120 connectors to different data sources and also allows the construction and publication of dashboards for individual use, however, sharing these dashboards with other users of the organization is not included within of this licensing.
In its Pro version, Power BI includes practically all the necessary functionalities to connect, create and share your reports with other users within your organization who also have the Pro license, in addition to Microsoft offering security and care to the information contained in your published boards. This license is ideal for the collaborative creation and reporting of indicators within a work team or an organization, however, it is important to highlight that each user must acquire a license of this type in order to view and edit the shared dashboards.
Finally, Power BI offers its Premium version for large projects. Among the functionalities of this license are dedicated cloud storage and processing, advanced controls, big data analysis and personalized technical support.
More workshops about Power BI
As with many of its other tools, Microsoft offers very comprehensive guided tutorials to get started with Power BI. From the most basic to the most complex, these are the trainings that the company offers free of charge for all its users.
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