With the importance of data in business being realized, the need and demand for adequate data has been rising exponentially. These businesses will try gather the data they need directly from source(the people) to increase its acccuracy but can also get such data from third parties. The required information reaches the businesses in many forms, and part of a data analyst's job is making sure that information is organized in a way that's conducive for analysis. Power BI is one of the go-to software resources used to handle business data for analysis.
Getting Data
Power BI offers analysts a variety of data connectors, making it easy to pull and merge data from diverse sources like SQL databases, Excel workbooks, CSV files, and even PDFs. This makes it easy to source and combine data from different sources without leaving Power BI.
Data Cleaning and Transformation
Power BI utilizes Power Query to do transformation of data that is already loaded or about to be loaded. Power Query gives the business analyst power to transform the raw data to a desirable format that is usable in the analysis stage. These transfromations can include actions like removing duplicate data, adding or replacing missing values, make corrections on the present data, removing outliers. Also, parts of the data can be changed into a desirable structure eg. changing date format from MM-DD-YYYY to DD-MM-YYYY.
Data Modelling
This stages allows an analyst set the general outlay of the business data allowing for tables to organized as a star schema or snowflake schema. The various tables will be identified as the fact or dimensional tables.
The relationship between the tables is also managed in this section ensuring data across the multiple tables is accessible.
DAX (Data Analysis Expressions)
The DAX language was created specifically for the handling of data models, through the use of formulas and expressions. It is these expressions, formulas and functions that are used to do analysis operations on the data. Operations like aggregation, logical analysis, time and data analysis, statistical analysis, filter functions, financial calculations are used to evaluate the data.
DAX uses diffirent operators to that indicate the kind of operation that will be done depending on predetermined preference value. The operators (from highest precedence to lowest) include:
- () - Parenthesis
2.FN() -Scalar functions
3.IN - Inclusive OR list
^ - Exponential
Sign - unary plus/minus eg.-1
Multiplication/division(*,/)
addition/subtraction(+,-)
& - Text Concatenation
=, ==, <>, <, >, <=, >= - Comparison operators
NOT - Logical negation
&& - Logical AND
12 || - Logical OR
Data Visualizations
It is easier for people to comprehend data presented graphically than numerically.For this reason, Power BI offers an assortment of data visualization tools like charts, graphs, cards, filters that are used to give the summary of the insights drawn from the data. Different type of graphs are used for different roles, for example, a line chart is used to show a trend while a bar graph is used to compare categorical data.
The final visualization is the dashboard that shows the most important data summaries inform of charts, graphs, KPIs to inform the decision making process.
Reporting
Power BI allows analysts to generate and publish reports that detail their findings that are shareable with the decision makers.
Conclusion
Power BI is a powerful end to end analytics tool that allows an analysts to get data, clean and transform it, analyse it, visualize insights and publish a report all within the same application.
Well communicated data-backed insights empower decision making teams to move away from guesswork and take decisive action based on empirical findings.
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