Power BI- Key Features, Top Components and How it’s Revolutionizing BI Landscape

Business Intelligence is a set of tools and techniques for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into useful information for meeting the needs of business analysis. BI Technologies are powerful enough to handle a large amount of structured/unstructured data easily for identifying, creating, and developing new strategic business opportunities. 

The main goal of BI is to make the process of interpretation of large volumes of data easy for the users. The insights can further help a business in identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy that can eventually provide a competitive advantage over other companies, along with long-term stability.

All in all, it makes the process of information discovery and analysis easy while allowing the decision-makers to access, understand, analyze, collaborate, and act on the information as and when required. 

Talking of Business Intelligence, businesses these days are looking forward to investing in pre-built powerful Business Intelligence tools that are engineered to deliver role-based, intuitive intelligence for front-end employees and senior management. 

One such tool that has revolutionized the world of Business Intelligence is the Power BI. The tool is easy, fast, and robust, which makes it possible even for the non-technical people to analyze the data visually and share the same. Moreover, the tool empowers Business Intelligence in a way that it reduces the distance between data and insights. 

Now that we have had a brief overview of what Power Bi is let's have a quick look at its features. 

Power BI- The Key Features 

1. Interactive Power BI desktop  

This interactive Power BI desktop tool allows you to build reports by accessing the data quickly. One doesn't need to have advanced skills to create a report with this powerful tool, it is quick and easy to learn to use.. Also, the best thing about his tool is that it is free to download tool, allowing you to create reports without possessing any technical knowledge. 

2. Customized Visualization 

Every organization functions differently, and they have their own way of getting things done. There are times when the right way to go is the standard way. Well, the same applies in the case of visualization. 

The Power Bi tool has a default standard, which sometimes is not sufficient for the organizations due to complex data. Under such circumstances, organizations can easily access the custom library of visualization and design yourself a visualization that serves your needs well. 

Prefer reading: Powerful Advantages of Microsoft Power BI

3. Visibility 

The center of all businesses is data, and the main challenge that organizations face today is manipulating the data with other datasets to derive useful information. 

Well, an effective way to do that is by collecting various datasets and organizing them visually for the purpose of better understanding. This form helps in delivering a deeper understanding of the data using which organizations can enjoy a competitive advantage over their competitors. 

So these were a few features of Power BI. Now, let's move forward and have a look at what empowers the Power BI to deliver actionable insights.

When it comes to Power BI, it is one tool that allows the process of data analysis to be quick, agile, and user-generated. It not only simplifies the task of data collaboration, analysis, and sharing but also makes takes the same to the next level. 

Here is a list of top three components that empower the performance of the BI solution at every step of the analysis. 

Power BI- Top Three Components

1. Power Pivot 

This component imports and integrates different datasets from different sources to develop in-memory data models. Such integration makes it easy for any functional user to improve the overall value by combining various data sources. 

The most classic examples of such integrations are when corporate sales/demographic/weather data is analyzed by using the tool Power BI. 

This component also supports complex calculations, key performance, and indicators, which can further be used by data analysts for prototyping and doing analysis of different business situations. See this beginners Guide to Power BI  for more details. 

2. Power Query

This component searches for data in various corporate data sources or online, and the picked dataset is then seamlessly imported into an Excel table, which serves to be a game-changing feature for many analysts. The native data connectivity feature offered by this component enables quicker and simpler access to the data. 

Power query does the tasks like renaming a column, replacing the values, merging the data, and other critical data modifications. This component is a big deal since it allows data cleansing and shaping hassle-free. 

3. Power View

When it comes to visualizing the data and making it even more interactive, Power View is the go-to component. It is supposed to cross-filter and highlight the data. Working with the data in the Power view component feels almost the same as working with Excel and PowerPoint tools. 

Apart from the graphs, tabular data, and charts, Power view supports different maps that have zoom and pan capabilities. 

Power BI- Revolutionizing Business Intelligence Landscape

If a business fails to deliver critical insights, it will lose the competitive edge and start to experience sales at a slower pace. And when it is about the most actionable business insight, there is nothing better than Power BI. 

This tool holds the power to change big data into visualizations and reports that are easy to understand. 

Now, the following are how Power BI has revolutionized the world of business intelligence. 

1. Robust Security 

To set up access to the control panel, Power BI uses Active Directory, and it is only through this panel that the organization will use different Microsoft solutions. Well, besides creating a traditional security layer, the Power BI is designed for developing security that allows the team to grant access in a very controlled manner. 

2. Organized and Accessible Data

Power BI was engineered to integrate a variety of Microsoft Tech, such as SharePoint and SQL databases. Currently, it is even taking data from non-Microsoft resources.  

Power BI can easily connect and integrate big data, streaming data, on-premise data sources, excel spreadsheets, and cloud data. So, it does not matter where the data is lying down; Power BI can merge and analyze it from any source as it is known to connect hundreds of sources of data seamlessly. 

3. Easy Implementation Process

The process of implementing Power BI across an organization is pretty easy as it calls for very few IT resources and engineering abilities. In fact, there are a few instances when it doesn't even require any technical knowledge on part of the end-users. 

All that managers have to do is develop an API key and plug the same inside the software. Using Power BI is even more straightforward for an enterprise using Microsoft systems such as Office 365 since BI solutions easily integrate with Office 365 and other Microsoft systems. 

Final Thoughts 

Power BI is an excellent and robust business intelligence tool, and it is going to stay in the world of data visualization for a really long time. It helps hundreds of data sources to connect quickly, infusing life in the data through comprehensive reports. 

So, if you have any doubts about its ability to control the future of the data-driven world, then you must know that it is the future and is not going to be outdated for a long time to come. 

Also, we like to hear from you, so if you hold expertise in the field, feel free to share your fruitful insights and help our determined community of readers.