Significant Tips To Effectively Use Microsoft Power BI

 Microsoft Power BI is an interactive data visualization and analytics tool developed for business intelligence (BI). With Power BI, you can pull in data from a wide range of sources and create dashboards. Power BI’s reports and dashboards can also be embedded in your existing reporting portals. You can use Power BI to prepare and manage high-quality data across the business in other tools, including low-code apps. Here are some powerful tips to get more insights from the information you already have in more unexpected areas. 

 

1.      Visualize your services

 

Power BI has several content packs, templates, and integrations for hundreds of data services, apps, and visualizations. Choose Xero for accounting, or K2 Cloud to build business processes, or Adobe Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Marketo, or MailChimp. You can use Power BI to visualize your data in those services, create reports, and bind them together in a custom dashboard.

Also, you can set up the on-premises gateway to use Power BI to explore data sets on your servers. This helps you to determine the best promotions that attract customers and compare website visitors with sales. With Power BI

, you can create your reports and visualizations, perform calculations, and set access levels for individual users, data sources, or specific dashboards and reports to control who can view more sensitive information.

 

2.      Create stories with your data

 

For numbers, Charts are the best options. But, if you wish to display information that understandably changes over time, Power BI’s new Timeline Storyteller is for you. You can create a linear list of dates or times or arrange them in customized shapes with this tool. You can also display a chronological list, a sequence that exhibits the event duration, or select relative scales.

Now, select the best representation, scale, and layout of your data, and Power BI will build a timeline from it. You can then use that to create the history of your business, display demand growth, or explain anything else in which the sequence of events matters.

 

3.      Explore ‘What-ifs.’

 

Power BI lets you compare scenarios in Excel by dragging a slider bar to display changes. Add a calculated measure for data such as revenue. You can use the New Parameter button in Power BI Desktop to add parameters that change in your What-if scenario. This creates a calculated measure with which you can refer anywhere.

However, suppose you make a What-if parameter for the number of customers who respond to a particular promotion. In that case, you can plug that with a formula that you create to show how many customer support tickets you can expect to have to deal with. Now, select “Add slider to this page” in the What-if parameter dialog box, add a slider bar that you can drag to show the difference when the number of customer responses is higher or lower.

 

4.      Build custom visualizations

 

Power BI consists of various types of visualizations, and you can add more as per need. You can add by downloading them from the Office Store or creating your own with the open source Power BI Custom Visual Tool. The Office Store consists of visualizations from Microsoft like word clouds, a correlation plot based on R script, a “box and whisker plot” that highlights outliers, clusters, and percentiles and visualizations created by Power BI customers.

You can even link Visio diagrams to Power BI if you want to analyze progress through workflows and processes. 

 

5.      Perform real-time analytics on streaming data flows

 

Most BI is done on data extracted from a database at scheduled intervals. If you want to analyze data from e-Commerce sites or operational technology systems with sensors, you need access to real-time streaming data. This requires extracting the data, but streaming data flows in Power BI connects to Azure Streaming Analytics. This enables business analysts to combine batched and streaming data in the same reports to find exceptions, trigger actions, and react instantly to changes in physical systems. 

 

6.      Turn on Teams integration

 

If your organization spends most of the day in Teams, taking Power BI reports to everyone engaged makes it highly useful. According to Microsoft, data usage in Power BI doubles when the app is grouped into Teams. If the IT organization has invested time and money rolling out Power BI, enabling Teams integration gets more out of that investment.

 

7.      Power BI for IT data

 

Power BI is not developed only for business users; it can also visualize data for IT monitoring tools. Power BI’s solution template for Azure Activity Logs uses an Azure SQL database and Stream Analytics for collecting logs and displaying them with prebuilt Power BI Desktop reports. With this, you can monitor the trends in usage and problems. Another set of prebuilt Power BI reports for the Intune Data Warehouse shows device details such as configurations and compliance state. There are templates for a range of other tools, and you can build your dashboards and reports for other tools with those templates.