Business intelligence, in the context of organizations, revolves around making better decisions about your business. Unlike the example in the introduction, organizations are not generally concerned with bathrooms, but rather with what can make their business more effective, efficient, and profitable. The businesses that provided those quotes on bathroom remodeling need to answer questions such as the following:

• How can the business attract new customers?
• How can the business retain more customers?
• Who are the competitors and how do they compare?
• What is driving profitability?
• Where can expenses be diminished?

There are endless questions that businesses need to answer every day, and these businesses need data coupled with business intelligence tools and techniques in order to answer these questions and make effective operational and strategic...

While Power BI is often classified as a visualization tool, the reality is that Power BI is not a single tool but rather a collection of interrelated tools and services that form a complete business intelligence ecosystem of its own. This ecosystem spans the entire business intelligence spectrum, from data sources to modeling, analysis, and visualization. In addition, this ecosystem includes components that are specific to Power BI itself but also to other Microsoft technologies that interoperate with Power BI, as well as third-party integrations. This interoperation with other Microsoft tools and technologies as well as third-parties makes Power BI a formidable business intelligence platform whose value far exceeds that of more siloed business intelligence tools in the market.

While the Power BI ecosystem is vast and complex, this ecosystem can be broken...

There are a number of ways to license Power BI technology, including the following:

• Power BI Free
• Power BI Pro
• Power BI Premium
• Power BI Embedded
• Power BI Report Server

Power BI Desktop is free to download, install, and use. In addition to simply sharing Power BI files (.pbix), which are the files that are created by the Power BI Desktop program, Microsoft provides a free method of using Power BI Service so that you can publish and share reports via a featured called Publish to web. Publish to web creates a web browser link or URL to a report that's published in the Power BI Service. While this URL is long and cryptic and these reports are not indexed by search engines, anyone with the...

After learning about the entire breadth and depth of the Power BI ecosystem and licensing, you may be wondering how on earth a single book can possibly cover everything there is to know about Power BI. The short answer is that it isn't possible. Entire books exist dedicated to just a single topic, including Power Query, DAX, and Power BI Embedded, alone. Even books that claim to be complete references to Power BI inevitably leave out some components of the entire Power BI ecosystem. Thus, this book is intended for those who wish to learn the basic, core components of the Power BI ecosystem, namely the following:

• Power BI Desktop:
  • Power Query
  • DAX
• Power BI Service:
  • On-premises data gateway

Learning about these core technologies and, while doing so, learning how to build and share reports with meaningful business intelligence insights means...

In this chapter, we were introduced to business intelligence and its key concepts. Then, we took a broad look at the Power BI ecosystem. Finally, we explored some more specific capabilities of the Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service.

In the next chapter, we will get Power BI Desktop installed, explore its interface, and familiarize ourselves with some of its functionality.