Why you need Microsoft’s Power BI today!

Most of us are visual people. We tend to understand something when we can see it. I'm not a programmer or even that computer savvy, but Power BI has been a Godsend to help me look at businesses in unique ways.

What is it?

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful graphical interface analysis tool for any business. An end user can create interactive dashboards, charts, graphs, and reports. It can be used to analyze many types of data including Sales, Expenses, Divisions, Products, Marketing Programs, Campaigns, Social media, customer service records, and many other types of information.

Free!

Everybody loves free. Free makes us happy. The downloadable desktop version of Power BI is free, while the enterprise Power BI Pro is available for $10 a month subscription fee. So far, Power BI has been enhanced and updated almost every month with new innovations and changes, or upgrades suggested by the users. All monthly upgrades are free of charge to the user.

Ease of Use.

Microsoft has created a tool that is easy for the layman to use. The basics of the tool is the ability to upload various types of data. From Excel, to text, from Facebook data to SQL, or from pdf's to xml, even QuickBooks, Power BI can upload a wide variety of data sets.

Visual Graphics.

Power BI has powerful graphics to help people visualize what's happening in their companies. There are not only a standard set of graphs, charts, reports, and key performance tiles (Power BI calls a chart or report a tile), but there are many custom tile types which can be uploaded for free. The possibilities are endless.

Combine unrelated data sets.

Want to know the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, but have two different data sets? Say you have a campaign which is posted on Facebook, Instagram, and twitter, with Power BI, you can combine these unlike data sets into one cohesive set of data which can be used to visually analyze the effectiveness of your campaign. Use it to look at product placement, divisions not performing well, unit cost variances, etc. You can use their simple join features to join these unlike data sets together to look at time, cost, effectiveness, and a host of other matrices.

In the visual below, the data is combined by territories, product lines, products, sales, and customer service calls.

Simple Programing Language.

Advanced programing using simple DAX programing language. If you've ever written a Excel statement using one of the Excel functions such as "=IF(A1>0,True)" you can quickly learn to query data using DAX. A DAX query can be something as simple as SALES AMOUNT = SUMX (Sales, Sales[Quantity] * Sales[Unit Price]). If you can't figure out how to write a DAX statement, there are many programmers (even on Fiverr) who can write a DAX code for cheap.

Upload big data sets

We hear the words Big Data and it scares us. Power BI can handle large data sets. While it's not unlimited, it is robust.

The limitation of a Power BI data set is as follows:

• 1 GB limit on the data size

• 2 billion row limit

• The maximum allowable columns across a full data set can be no greater than 16,000 columns

A two billion row limit, that's pretty big.

Great tutorials.

There are great tutorials and video's online. These are two of my favorites from YouTube.

-Guy in a Cube

-Avi Singh - Power BI Pro