Power BI is a comprehensive analytic platform that allows you to extract analytics and generate insights from your data. With Power BI, you can create highly interactive, engaging, and powerful reports, dashboards, or graphics from data in formats such as Excel files, SQL databases, BI warehouses, Cloud data, APIs, web pages, and more. Let’s understand the key components before we jump into the Power BI features.
Understanding the Components of Power BI
Power Query
The data transformation and mashup engine are Power Query. It allows you to discover, connect, integrate, and enhance data sources to meet your analysis needs.
Power Pivot
Power Pivot is a data modeling method that allows you to develop data models, relationships, and calculations. Using the Data Analysis Expression (DAX) language, it models simple and complex data.
Power View
Excel, Sharepoint, SQL Server, and Power BI all include Power View. It allows you to build interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other graphics that help you visualize your data. It can connect to data sources and filter data for each data visualization element or the complete report.
Power Map
Power Map for Excel and Power BI is a 3-D data visualization tool from Microsoft that allows you to map and plot more than a million rows of data visually on Bing maps in 3-D format from an Excel table or Data Model in Excel.
Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is a Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View development tool. With Power BI Desktop, you have everything in one place and can quickly build BI and data analysis skills.
Power Q&A
Power BI’s Q&A tool lets you explore your data on your terms. It’s the quickest way to receive a natural-language answer from your data.
Let’s look at Power BI features now.
Features of Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a collection of BI tools for creating complex visualizations and shareable reports. The following are some of Power BI’s outstanding features:
1. Analytics and data management
Microsoft Power BI provides powerful analytics to assist users in gaining valuable insights, transforming data into powerful components capable of providing ideas and breakthroughs to resolve business problems.
Advanced analytics in Power BI allows business users to track key performance parameters. It helps the business figure out the signs which lead to additional opportunities and success. Power BI creates stunning interactive dashboards and is a complex data management solution worthy of being termed. It uses data mining and BI technologies to identify data trends and provides tools to aid advanced analytics.
2. Retrieving Quick Insights from Power BI
Using powerful algorithms, users can obtain exciting insights from various subsets of the data. Quick Insights gives people better and faster access to analytics results with a single click.
3. Ask a Question
With this functionality, users can ask questions and get instant responses in the form of visuals such as charts, tables, or graphs.
4. Extracting Intuitive reports in Power BI
Power BI reports are a collection of dashboards that are comprehensive and well organized, with various types of visualizations and formats that are relevant to a specific business issue by presenting valuable insights. Users may quickly share Power BI reports with other users.
Also Read, Power BI Dashboards: Eight Practices Every Enterprise Should Know
5. Integration of Azure Machine Learning
Because of the inclusion of Machine Learning in Power BI, users can now visualize the outcomes of Machine Learning algorithms by dragging, dropping, and joining data modules.
6. Data Analysis Expression
Data Analysis Expression helps extract one or more values from a data set by analyzing the results generated by applying multiple formulae to the dataset under observation. It works similarly to Microsoft Excel, except without the numbers and rows. Data Analysis reports are simple to comprehend and create.
7. Real-time data analytics
As data is sent or streamed in, Power BI dashboards refresh in real-time, allowing viewers to solve problems and spot possibilities instantly. Real-time data and images are available in any report or dashboard. Factory sensors, social media sources, and anything else that may gather or transmit time-sensitive data are potential sources of streaming data into Power BI dashboards/reports.
8. Data Visualization and Reporting
Using Power BI will result in a more profound knowledge of data and the discovery of business insights in real-time. Power BI has many pre-built visualizations and the possibility to customize existing ones or choose from an ever-growing library of in-built visualizations.
Business users may apply Power BI’s robust analytics features to analyze data and deliver insights across the organization at all levels. Power BI gives an end-to-end view of critical metrics and key performance indicators, all in real-time and in one location, through accessible and interactive dashboards.
9. Lively Dashboards
Provides a single point of reference with a complete visual picture of business-critical information.
10. Pre-existing Ready to use templates
Microsoft and the community have offered hundreds of out-of-the-box graphics, including charts, cards, KPIs, maps, and matrices.
Also Read, Introduction to the Azure IoT Products and an Overview of Azure IoT Hub
11. Security
Power BI is a business intelligence platform that ensures your data is safe with industry-leading data security features like sensitivity labeling, end-to-end encryption, and real-time access monitoring.
With Power BI, row-level security (RLS) may be utilized to limit data access for specific users. To restrict data access at the row level, you can use filters within roles.
12. Data encryption
Power BI encrypts data both in transit and at rest. By default, Power BI encrypts your data with Microsoft-managed keys. You can also use your keys for data at rest loaded into a dataset with Power BI Premium.
Final Thoughts
Apart from fantastic data visualization and representation, Power BI has several additional capabilities, like content packs, which contain samples of dashboard reports, natural language, which allows users to choose the language, custom visualization, and DAX functions.
