Getting started with Power BI

Power BI is a Business Intelligence tool used to analyze and visualize data. It is provided by Microsoft and helps users make data-driven decisions and insights. The good thing with Power BI is that it allows you to get data from different sources eg Excel Workbook, Text/CSV, PDF, XML, JSON files, among others.

There are 3 basic parts of Power BI:

1. Power BI desktop
2. Power BI service.
3. Power BI app (used in smart phones).

Power BI is generally used in businesses and organizations to come up with dashboards and reports. These are then used to study the behavior of different components in the business and to come up with data-driven decisions. Below is an image showing a simple dashboard with two charts: a line chart and a waterfall chart.

Some of the benefits of Power BI are:

1. It allows you to build a personalized dashboard and report. You can tailor your dashboard and reports to meet your specific needs and wants.
2. Can update in real-time. Power BI lets you update dashboards and stream datasets in real-time.
3. It is constantly updated and thus new features which make visualization and analysis even simpler, are constantly added.
4. Easy sharing and distribution of data. One can upload their reports and dashboards to Power BI service and share this with others. The data will reflect on everyone's side in real-time when any changes occur.

Another powerful feature of Power BI is that it allows you to perform a deep dive of the underlying data and tell us what's causing an increase or decrease as shown in the image below.

If you are searching for a tool that is user-friendly, with a smooth learning curve, but can still do good analyses, visualizations and reports, then Power BI is the best place to look. It is also a very friendly tool for beginners and they will master it in no time. Get started today.