What is Power BI?
Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence and data visualization platform. At its simplest, it helps you take data that may be difficult to interpret in its raw form and turn it into reports, charts, dashboards, and other visualizations that make the information easier to understand.
That data can come from many different places. Excel spreadsheets, SQL Server databases, cloud applications, accounting systems, and other business applications can all potentially become data sources for Power BI.
Power BI is more than charts
It's easy to think of Power BI as a tool for creating attractive charts, but visualization is only part of what it does. A typical Power BI solution involves several steps:
- Connect to one or more sources of business data.
- Transform and clean the data so that it is consistent and useful.
- Model relationships between different sets of data.
- Calculate useful business measures and metrics.
- Visualize the results in interactive reports.
- Share those reports with the people who need them.
Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service
Power BI Desktop is the Windows application commonly used to build reports and data models. It provides the tools for connecting to data, transforming it, defining relationships and calculations, and designing report pages.
The Power BI service is the cloud-based portion of the platform. Reports created in Power BI Desktop can be published to the service so they can be shared, refreshed, secured, and viewed by other users.
Connecting data from different systems
One of Power BI's biggest advantages is its ability to bring information together from systems that were never designed to work together. A company might have customer information in one database, financial information in another application, and operational data in spreadsheets maintained by employees.
Instead of manually copying those numbers into a monthly spreadsheet, Power BI can often connect directly to the underlying sources and create a repeatable reporting process.
Interactive reporting
Power BI reports aren't limited to static charts. Users can filter information, drill into details, compare time periods, and explore relationships in the data. A single report might provide an executive summary while still allowing someone to investigate the individual transactions behind a number.
Where does Power BI fit?
Power BI is particularly useful when an organization has data but struggles to turn that data into information people can actually use. It can replace some manually maintained reporting processes, provide a common view of important metrics, and make information available without requiring someone to run a database query every time a question comes up.
The technology is only part of the equation, though. A useful Power BI solution starts with understanding what questions the business needs to answer, where the relevant data lives, and what those numbers actually mean.