What is Power BI? Power BI is known as business intelligence software. Business intelligence software allows us to work with very large and complex data sets.
Data comes in all shapes and sizes and it's very difficult to derive meaning from just rows and rows of data. So business intelligence software allows us to produce meaningful reports and with insights that are actionable from that dataset it helps us identify patterns and trends that we just otherwise would not be able to see in the data.
And ultimately it's about making better informed decisions with those results.
There are five stages to working in Power BI the first step is where we will connect to a data source. Data is not generated in Power BI instead. We connect to another system that could be an Excel spreadsheet or SQL Server database. And from there, we will then import a copy into our Power BI report.
The second step once we've got that copy of the data is to cleanse and transform it. This is very important part of any data analysis and it's where we will get the data ready for analysis.
Data contains errors, it can be messy and there often mistakes sometimes down to human error. Sometimes just down to the way in which the data has been downloaded off another system.
And if we don't correct those mistakes, then it will have an impact on our analysis.
The third step is where we'll model the data Modeling the data is very important if we have more than one table in our report because sometimes we want to use both those tables in order to produce some visuals. So modeling the data allows us to join those tables together in order to get those results.
The fourth step is where we'll actually analyze and visualize data. So that allows us to create some interesting insights with a huge range of tools which Power BI has available.
We then visualize those results in charts and again Power BI has a large range of different chart types for us to choose from. The fifth and final step is where we will share and present those results and this is often done in the form of a dashboard, which is a really interesting and engaging way to present our findings.
Power BI has three different ways in which we can use it.
The main way is by using Power BI desktop from here we will connect to the data, transform it, we will model it, and we will also create the visualizations from the analysis.
As well as Power BI desktop, we also have the Power BI cloud service available. So we can publish our work up to the cloud and then share or present it to other users. We can also create some really interesting and engaging dashboards where we bring all our results together and provide our audience with a very interesting and meaningful way to interpret the results.
And the third way in which we can use Power BI is we can download the app onto our phone and it's available for iOS or Android.
