Microsoft's Power BI suite is designed to turn your data into useful information quickly. It is crucial to fetch relevant information from the data and present it in a lucid matter. This blog will explain all you need to know about Power BI. 



Why is Power BI Important? 

Here are a couple of reasons why Power BI is such a great tool - 

• It's built on the convention of the best BI products available (SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and Microsoft Excel) 
• It's being built/rebuilt using the latest technologies (HTML 5.0, cloud computing, column store databases & smartphone mobile apps) 
• Microsoft has now opened the custom visuals gallery for open-source contributions which has added value to the community. 
• The new trend towards self-service business intelligence suggests Microsoft's leading position in this space. 

Now that we have discussed the importance of Power BI in the analytics field, let's move on to what is Power BI? 

Microsoft's Power BI is a cloud-based, business analytics service for analyzing and visualizing data. It gives you a platform to be both productive and creative with reports and analytics. Producing useful information from the data and creating visual reports is a multiple-step process. Which we will now go over. 

Working with Power BI 

Step 1: Connecting your data 

Power BI allows its users to connect to an extensive variety of data sources and you can use Power BI Desktop or Power BI services to connect your data. 

You have two options, which are to either import it into Power BI or instead upload it to your file. 

Step 2: The preformatting of data 

When your data has been uploaded, you can now shape that data according to your needs and how you want it. This includes renaming the columns or tables, changing the text into numbers, removing rows or adding rows, setting the first row as headers, etc. 

Step 3: Modelling data 

Modelling data is for enhancing the data with relationships, calculations, measures, hierarchies, and so on. This can then be used to find business insights. 

Step 4: Data visualisation 

This step is where you experiment with data and visualisation types. There are a variety of visual tools and custom visual galleries, which you can use to create reports for your organisation. You can do this without having to write any code. 

Step 5: Publishing your data reports 

After using Power BI services, you can now export or issue reports. You can also set up automatic data refresh which will supply you with near real-time analytics of trends.