A quick guide on Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform provided by Microsoft. You is used to generate reports, analyze data and share insights among organisation.

You can monitor your business processes and make decisions based on the current data of your business. You can modify the data and create various visuals of the data.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

With Power BI, you can get data from different sources and build data models. Data models are then used to create visual & reports which can be shared with others.

Who uses this tool?

Power BI is mostly used by data analysts, marketers, sales professionals and accountants, designers and developers to create data models. However, anyone can use it to create personalized reports on a given data.

Is technical knowledge important to use/learn Power BI?

Though this tool is used to analyze data, technical knowledge is not necessary to learn and work on this tool.

If working with data sheets, you should have a fair command over Excel to be able to modify and transform data sheets before loading them into Power BI. Plus, there are no of sources including cloud based sources such as Salesforce from where data can be taken.

To have you a better understanding, I have made this tutorial. You may follow along, there are sample data sheets available so you can start right away. You just need to download and launch Microsoft Power BI desktop before starting this tutorial.

To download the latest version of Power BI, you can use the following link −

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

Features of Power BI

Sources- It allows us to pull data from over 70 sources such as SQL, Google analytics, Adobe analytics, Salesforce and much more.

Cortana- Users may use speech assistant to query data using Cortana.

Personalization- Appearence of the reports may be changed to cater the needs and looks of the company by changing colors, format etc.

Interactive- Power BI is a very interactive tool and results may be seen in different ways thanks to the interactive UI of this platform.

Drag and drop feature- It provides multiple ways to pull data into the reports. You may easily drag and drop the data listed in the table to the dashboard.

Steps involved

• The first step is to get data. The list of data sources can be found within the software in “GET DATA”. If you are a beginner with the purpose to learn the tool, then you may use sample data provided by Microsoft.

• After the data is pulled, you are asked to modify (transform) the data according to your needs. This involves deleting, adding or changing data.

• After that, data may be transformed and automatically sent to the Power BI dashboard where you can see the relationship between different data sheets. You may also add more data if you want.

• Power BI dashboard has various visual tools to present the data. You use these tools to build reports.

• Final reports may be published and shared via email or access to the reports may be given to others.

Supported Operating Systems

• Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2
• Microsoft Power BI Desktop requires Internet Explorer 9 or higher
• Microsoft Power BI Desktop is available for 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) platforms

 To download the latest version of Power BI, you can use the following link −

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

I hope you found this post helpful. I try to write about topics that are often disregarded but they are the stepping stones for your early success in digital marketing. If you would like to get in touch, feel free to comment or reach out to me on LinkedIn and I have recently started to provide helpful content on YouTube as well.

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Happy learning 🙂