In today’s data-driven world, the success of any business relies heavily on a huge amount of data. These data are highly important for the efficiency, growth, and success of a business or an organization. But monitoring, estimating, and analyzing these data, is something that needs to be constantly performed.
In simple words, Business Intelligence analyses a company’s raw data and analytics and provides actionable takeaways and informed decisions that are beneficial for the company’s growth. These informed decisions are generally made with the help of Business Intelligence and Analytics tools. To name a few tools are Tableau, SAS, Qliksense, and many others, but here in this article, we will discuss Microsoft Power BI and a few of the benefits and advantages of using it.
What is Power BI?
With business intelligent tools getting popular nowadays, Microsoft with its proven track record in the field of technology came up with the idea of its own analytics tool, Microsoft Power BI.
Power BI is a cloud-based Business Intelligence and reports authoring tool that allows enterprises to easily analyze and visualize their data. Power Bi provides a simple interface for users to transform their raw data into rich visualizations, interactive dashboards, and user-friendly reports. Power BI provides different versions for users like Power Bi desktop, Service-based, and also mobile Power BI apps.
Here are our top 7 reasons why you should use Power BI for data analytics and business analytics.
1. Easy to Connect Data
Power BI helps users to load their data into one place from a large variety of cloud-based sources such as Azure Data Warehouse, DropBox, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Excel, SQL Server Database, and many others.
With built-in connectors, developers can import their datasets from different sources and build their own reports and dashboards. Users can also load a pre-built Power BI dashboard and perform further customizations and analyses on it as per their requirements.
2. Provides Data Governance and Security
Power BI provides an ample number of security features that helps users to protect sensitive data, information, user access, and many more. Power BI uses Microsoft’s Cloud Security feature, which provides rich visibility, authentication, and sophisticated analytics that help to identify and combat any cyber threats from occurring.
Power BI provides developers with a sensitivity label feature which makes it easy for users to label which data/information is sensitive. Another powerful feature is the row-level security (RLS) feature which helps users to filter, restrict and establish certain roles for certain employees or groups.
3. Power of Artificial Intelligence
It has the capabilities of artificial intelligence permitting users to get data’s value. The three visuals it possesses are Q&A Visual, The Key Influencers Visual, and The Decomposition Tree Visual. With the help of these visuals, users can dive deeper and generate reports based on users’ demands using Q&A Visuals, which analyzes the data given by you and provide you with key influencers, to drive insights and know the reason behind the cause of any factor.
4. Allows Users to Build Personalized Dashboards and Interactive Reports Easily
Power BI lets users create personalized dashboards and interactive reports by providing a simple interface. It provides users with countless intuitive and powerful data visualization options from which users can choose and customize their reports as per their needs. Developers can also use the drag-and-drop functionality to create personalized dashboards, reports, and visualizations.
5. Offers Familiar Excel Integration
Microsoft Excel is one of the powerful tools used by businesses when it comes to data analytics and reporting efforts. Power BI seamlessly integrates with Excel and provides an interface that is almost similar to Excel. Users who are proficient in Excel and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) can find patterns and as navigating the Power Query tool easily.
6. Affordable and Cost-Effective
Compared to many business analytics tools available in the market, Power BI is still relatively cheap and cost-effective. For this very reason, it is used by numerous small and mid-sized businesses. It offers two versions, Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium so that users can pick the one suited to their business. For small and mid-sized companies, Power BI Pro is preferred as it is entry-level. It provides all the functionality at a low cost. Power BI Premium on the other hand is more expensive and suitable for large-sized businesses.
7. Provides Monthly Updates
In the Microsoft Power Bi tool, new features and functionalities are often added and existing features are frequently updated to keep the tool bug free. Microsoft proactively listens to the Power BI community and continues to invest time and money into updating the functionalities and features. Microsoft is constantly trying to make Power BI one of the best and most valuable data analytics tools.
Also, to bring to an end, Power BI provides users with multiple pre-packed unique data visual options which can be used to enhance the presentation and functionality of reports and dashboards. Applications like Power BI empower keep a company efficient by analyzing the data, improving accessibility, and gaining smarter insights. With all the powerful adaptive features of Power BI, it is not hard to understand why Power BI is growing in popularity among businesses and becoming one of the most useful data analytics tools in the world.