Empower Your Data With Power BI

(By: Shahzad Ali, CEO – Forte Business Solutions) Your organization will often have large data from ERP software, online store, and social media, and your data may be distributed over more than one distributed database!

Yes, this is happening in many enterprises. Therefore, there is a need for solutions based on collecting this data and converting it into information that helps managers make their decisions. Thus, Business Intelligence Technologies and Methodologies have emerged. These technologies transform primary data into meaningful business information, summarizing and presenting data in the form of charts and graphs, showing the trend and allowing you to interact with and view data from more than angle.

For 12 consecutive years, Gartner has named Microsoft as a Magic Quadrant Leader among analytics and business intelligence platforms. Download Report!

There are many solutions such as Qlik View, Tableau, Oracle Business Intelligence, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Services, and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). In 2015, Power BI was introduced as a cloud service in Office 365 packages.

Microsoft built Power BI for end users to connect to the mission-critical data in their organizations, and Dynamics 365 is a vital source of information for Microsoft customers who are using Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (CRM), Finance and Operations (ERP), Talent (Human Resources), and more.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

It is a service for business analysis provided by Microsoft. It allows users to create interactive data visualization and representations that are interactive.

The service allows sharing of reports within your organization or the public through inclusion in websites or external applications. There are no limits to the type, location or number of databases you deal with, all are readable through this service by building relationships and extracting reports.

There is a free version of Power BI that you can install and work on your desktop.

There are also additional packages for Power BI, including Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium. To view the details of each package, click here. To find out the difference between the different licenses for Power BI click here.

According to Gartner, Microsoft products have been evaluated as the leader in analytics and business intelligence in terms of completeness of vision and scalability.

Key components of the Power BI system:

Power BI Desktop

A program that loads on a Windows computer, you’ll find it easier to design reports and then upload them to the cloud. You can get the program for free at: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/

Power BI Service

The Power BI cloud service that comes with the Office 365 service, any report designed on Power BI can be uploaded to this platform and shared.

Power BI Mobile Apps

This is a mobile version of Power BI used to browse reports only. There are versions running on iOS, Android and Windows phone. In designing the report, you can design a separate interface for your report and control how it appears on mobile and tablet devices.

Power BI Gateway

If you have a database or Excel file on a local machine and the report is on the cloud you will need to use the Power BI Gateway so that the report can connect to your device and update the report data.

Power BI Embedded

Is an API and general service that is designed for developers and service providers who want to run reports that are designed by Power BI in other applications altogether. The user of this application does not have to have Power BI. To know more about Power BI Embedded; Click Here.

Power BI Report Server

The local version of Power BI Service, or so-called On-Premises, for users who do not want to host their data on the cloud. To know more; Click Here!

Power BI Visuals Marketplace

This service is used when there is a need for a custom visuals format that is not in the default list that comes with Power BI. To know more Click Here!

In conclusion: working on Power BI is not complicated, you need some training to begin to understand your data and build relationships properly.