Power BI: The Rise – Part 1

Introduction

Since its inception in 2013, Power BI has come a long way with timely changes to capture the BI market. After making it generally available to the public as a SaaS solution in 2015, with continuous improvement in its features and functionality, it has announced that it is here to stay strong in a rapidly evolving world of data analytics and business intelligence. Power BI has cemented its place strongly in the world of data-driven decision-making. We are uncovering ten key features of Power BI that helped it stay on top of the competition. 

Data Visualization

Power BI has 35+ native compelling visualizations that are highly interactive. These visualizations help in understanding the trends and patterns in the data easily to aid data-driven decision-making. Any visualization can be easily created using drag and drop technique. 

Interactive reports

You can create interactive report pages, where you can easily drill through transaction-level details from a report summary. You also have the drill-down functionality on most of the visuals to see data in the hierarchy. It is also quite easy to apply filters to your report or visuals with the help of the filter pane.

Data Connectivity

There are more than 130 default connectors in Power BI Desktop using which you can connect to most of the widely used data sources in the world, whether it is a file, cloud service, or on-premises databases. 

Data Modelling

Using Power BI, you can create complex data modeling solutions based on your requirements. You can easily create a robust data model using drag and drop technique. 

DAX (Data Analysis Expression)

This will stand as one of the most powerful features of Power BI. This formula language will give users the ability to create customized and complex calculations on their data based on the requirements. This feature undoubtedly gave a huge competitive advantage for it. 

Power Query

One of the biggest challenges often faced by data analysts is cleaning a large amount of unstructured data. Within Power BI Desktop there is a separate tool called Power Query Editor, which can be used to clean, edit, and transform the data easily with a click of buttons. 

Mobile Access

Using it, stakeholders can easily access the reports and dashboards on their mobile devices and make decisions on the go. Decision-makers can also set alerts on data to take immediate action. 

Natural Language Query

This is also a significant feature in Power BI Just like how we use Google to get the information we need its users can simply type in a question regarding their data using the Q&A feature within Power BI. This Q&A feature will give the accurate result to the user, in the visual the user needs to see. 

Data Security

The security of the data is an utmost priority for Microsoft Power BI. Through role-based access and data encryption, Power BI ensures only the right person sees the right data. 

AI Integration

Power BI has certain in-built AI capabilities that help in anomaly detection, forecasting, natural language processing, etc. Apart from that there are also some AI-enabled visuals like Decomposition tree, Key influencer, etc. There is also another feature called ‘Quick Insights’ on its Service, which helps you with useful insights from your data through meaningful visualizations. 

Conclusion

Power BI’s rich features have helped various organizations in getting insights from their data and make data-driven decisions. These features have also helped to gain a huge competitive advantage in the BI industry over the last few years. They have also the ever improving and exciting ‘feature updates’ almost every month. 

However, with the latest updates in the Power BI community, it has been made clear that Power BI is not here just to stay, but to rule. Let us uncover them in the next blog post ‘Power BI: The rule.’ 

References

https://app.powerbi.com/home

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