POWER BI – The future of Data Visualization

Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, where end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on any information technology staff or database administrator. This tool provides cloud-based BI services known as Power BI services and is available in both Desktop and Mobile versions. Since its introduction in 2014, Microsoft has invested a lot, both in terms of money and time in Power BI’s evolution to bring it up as one of the leaders in the Data Visualization tools.   Power BI comes with both the free version and the Pro. The Pricing List link gives us a fair detail on the difference between both the versions as we as the pricing details.   Evolution of Power BI: Power BI is not just a self-service data analytics tool like Power Pivot or Pivot table/chart options in the excel, not JUST another tool which gives the option of cloud or a simple data visualization tool like any other tools in the market, but a combination of all the above said points plus more! With the latest release of the Power BI, the user can twist and twirl the data in many ways with the help of a very powerful data-mashup engine. Users can model the data by building their own star schema, add a number of measures and measure groups, many calculated columns, yet get the results quickly, (thanks to an In-Memory superfast engine) and all these without having to worry about how to fetch the data, since Power BI gives you a number of source connectors which can connect to so many different data sources (and Microsoft is adding many more data sources – On-premise and cloud – every month)   According to Microsoft, the Power BI as such is an umbrella, which has brought many features that Microsoft had released in a different time period and finally brought them together with a fantastic data visualization platform. Below are the few features that were released independently from 2010.  

• Power Pivot: tabular data modeling option in Excel
• Power View: a Visualization tool for regular data
• Power Map: a Visualization tool for Spatial data (Bing map integration etc..)

  Along with all these features, Microsoft has added a few more features like Power Query, Q&A to complete the POWER BI tool.   There are so many things users can achieve from Power BI. Power BI Desktop is a powerful tool to build your dashboards, host them in the PowerBI website and let the users access the dashboard without any hassles. In upcoming blogs, we will take you through developing some of the not-so-regular dashboards and reports and how to host them.