All about Power BI
Summary:
Power BI is a significant business intelligence application that helps create interactive reports and share insights.
This article will help you avoid some obvious mistakes that many new Power BI users repeat while creating reports. You can make interactive reports quickly for discovering and sharing business insights in 2021.
Unquestionably, Power BI gives business the most efficient, dynamic, and user-friendly platform for analyzing data; however, people often do it wrong.
If you are looking to create helpful reports in Power BI for discovering and sharing insights quickly, here are a few things that you should avoid. So, let’s start with a short introduction to Power BI.
Introduction
Power BI is a Cloud-based, easy-to-use analytics solution where users can create dynamic dashboards and Power BI reports while connecting data from different data sources.
It empowers users to interact effectively with data in real-time, eliminating the need to hire an IT team. Powerful reporting further results in better use of time in different departments.
With Power BI, users can create interactive reports and share these reports with other team members instantly. It allows users to interact from anywhere, anytime, using any smart device.
The affordable, reliable business intelligence tool unifies your company’s data across a variety of sources. It connects data from over 50 data sources that the majority of businesses use and collaborates it in a centralized environment. Some of the data sources include:
- XML
- DB2
- Excel
- Azure
- Oracle
- Sybase
- Marketo
- Salesforce
- Mail Chimp
- SQL Server
- Google Analytics
- Microsoft Dynamics GP
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- And More!
Crucial Benefits of Power BI
- Create dashboards and develop reports in minutes.
- Visualize, analyze, and manage everything in one place.
- Connect with your data securely on-premises or in the Cloud.
- Execute Power BI easily and quickly with minimal IT resources.
- Robust security allows controlling access to business-critical data.
Keep it Simple
Don’t get lured by the fancy visualizations, particularly when you are a newbie and creating your first report. Power BI gives you thousands of options to make your reports more compelling.
At the same time, it gives you hundreds of options to lose into creativity, and you will end up making it complicated.
You can consider using line or bar charts instead of tree-maps as the former are more effective and efficient. Here are some hacks to increase the effectiveness of your reports.
- Use horizontal bar charts to compare rankings in data.
- If you want to represent two datasets, use the combination of a bar chart and a line chart.
- Try to add most business-critical data in the top left corner of your reports since humans tend to read data starting from the top left segment.
Create Relations to Make Your Reports Interactive
Interactive elements in the reports can improve comprehension and interaction multiple times. Each report must have multiple sets of data where each set has its importance. Suppose you have three sets of data for which you have created four different types of charts.
Power BI integrates powerful elements that allow the user to develop relations between all different sets of data. As a result, you click on one data set, and the report will highlight that particular set in all the charts.
Power BI includes three different types of interactions:
- No filtering where the user creates no relationship between all the data sets.
- Highlight that allows the user to click on one bar, and it highlights that particular dataset in all the charts.
- The actual filtered value allows the user to check the hidden values behind a data set without relation.
Use Layouts & Color Combinations
Layouts help to maintain an aesthetic look and add an element of professionalism to the reports. You can even create attractive layouts in PowerPoint and use them in Power BI reports. You can easily manage and segmenting the space in your reports by selecting a compelling layout upfront.
Like any other thing, color adds an appealing effect to reports too. Always make sure to use the right combination of colors in your reports. But maintain a balance and don’t overdo it.
Use Filters in the Reports
Filters are one of the most crucial parts of data processing and analysis software. However, the amount and types of filters that Power BI offers are more interactive and advanced than any other software application. Here are some important filters Power BI offers.
- Visual level filter: It filters data on the basis of color and background of the report. If you feel any of the datasets in your reports appear hidden due to the background color combination, you can use Visual level filters.
- Page-level filter: It allows users to broadly filter elements in a page.
- Report level filter: It filters data at a single instance of time across all reports. Once you enable this filter, it will be applied to all the pages of the reports automatically.
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Effective Use of Hierarchies
Business analysts and sometimes different members of the organization use and analyze the Power BI reports. A particular data may be significant for one department, while some datasets are important for another department.
Power BI integrates an amazingly useful feature of hierarchy that helps managing data effectively for keeping the interest levels of different departments in line. Hierarchies available in Power BI includes:
- Users can utilize data sources as a hierarchy.
- Users can select to integrate multiple dimensions in the reports.
- Hierarchy can be designed on the basis of date or time-date data. This feature is useful for the department who want to analyze and compare weekly and quarterly progress in different areas.
Power BI consulting professionals can help you create appealing and compelling reports that interactively tell your business story.
To be able to discover and share insights quickly with Power BI, there are a lot of things such as visualizations, images, icons, layouts, etc., that you must be well familiar with to add it effectively into your reports.
