Power BI in a nutshell
Power BI is a business intelligence service offered by Microsoft that enables the creation of online data dashboards. Let's go through its most essential features:
- Power BI comes with a traditional application software called Power BI Desktop, which you can download and install, for free, on your computer. Power BI Desktop offers the full design functionalities of Power BI: you can use this software to create your dashboards, save them in local files (with the
.pbixextension), and then share them with other users, who can, in turn, view and edit your dashboards. To complete this chapter, you will only need to use the Power BI Desktop application. - It's important to know that Power BI is primarily offered as a cloud-based service. If you decide you want to use Power BI at scale in your company to leverage corporate data sources and make dashboards available online via browsers or mobile apps (without the need for all users to install Power BI Desktop and open files shared via email), then you can do so by acquiring Pro or Premium licenses. In this way, your dashboards will rely on the Microsoft cloud platform, called Azure, for hosting, processing, and making data available to end users.
If your company uses Microsoft 365 cloud services, you might already have a Power BI Pro license: it's worth checking this out.
- Power BI leverages a user-friendly visual interface that lets you design dashboards without the need to write any code. Still, if you want to specify advanced queries, you can use the programming language called DAX, which is short for Data Analysis eXpressions. We will not cover DAX in this book, but it's good to know that you can extend Power BI functionalities by leveraging it if you need it.
- Power BI offers more than plain data visualizations. It lets you pull data from different sources, transform and harmonize tables, apply some logic and algorithms, and make data accessible through interactive charts or other non-traditional ways. For example, a remarkable functionality of Power BI is to give users the possibility to obtain data by typing questions in plain English like what is the evolution of profit for brand X over the last two years? In this case, your role as a designer will be to "teach" Power BI how to interpret your colleagues' questions by deciding, for instance, what words are used as synonyms to describe the same entities (for example, articles, SKUs, and products).
- Power BI can be extended with additional features and visuals. You can check the Microsoft App store called AppSource (appsource.microsoft.com), from where you can download additional custom visualizations for free. Another way to extend Power BI functionalities is to add Python or R code snippets as a way to implement specialized charts or add machine learning functionalities.
All in all, Power BI promises to be a powerful and well-rounded tool for democratizing data in a company through accessible dashboards: this is exactly what we need to complete our data analytics toolbox and unlock substantial value for our business. Before exploring its user interface and getting acquainted with its naming conventions, let's get Power BI Desktop up and running on your computer. You can either retrieve it from its download page (powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads) and then install it or look it up on the Microsoft Store app in Windows. Although it is not required for the sake of the chapter, you can also register for a free Power BI license. This would let you access the cloud-based services and save your reports, for your own use, on the cloud (sharing them with others would require buying a paid license).
