Microsoft PowerBI
What is PowerBI?
Power BI is a business analytics and data visualisation platform helping you to gain insights into your data and measure performance across your organisation. It allows you to easily connect to a variety of data sources, transform the data to your needs and use it to create powerful charts. For visualisation, you can choose from many chart types and customise them according to your preferences.
Power BI is part of Microsoft’s Power Platform family, which includes Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents.
Input from Microsoft
Create amazing data experiences
Easily connect to, model, and visualise your data, create memorable reports personalised with your KPIs and brand. Get fast, AI-powered answers to your business questions − even when asking with everyday language.
Gain insights from your largest BI deployments
Make the most of your big data investments by connecting to all your data sources with the scale to analyse, share, and promote insights across your organisation while maintaining data accuracy, consistency, and security.
Make decisions with confidence
Work together seamlessly on the same data, collaborate on reports, and share insights across popular Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Teams and Excel. Empower everyone in your organisation to quickly make data-driven decisions that drive strategic actions.
Key Strengths that differentiate Microsoft PowerBI from its Competitors
1. Leverage on existing know-how
In many cases, coding language in Power BI will already be familiar to you. For instance, if you’ve worked with Excel formulas, you’ll get to grips with DAX quite quickly. In case you’re experienced in Power Pivot, you’ll immediately recognise the data extraction and transformation environment.
2. Integration into the Office 365 environment
Power BI integrates seamlessly with Office 365 (Microsoft’s package containing Teams, Excel, Word, Outlook, etc.). This usually makes it a lot more developer- and user-friendly as reports can more easily be embedded where you expect them to be.
On top of that, Power Apps makes it possible to embed low-code applications into Power BI and use them to, for example, capture comments in a structured way. With Power Automate you can trigger entire process chains, making it a great entry point into Robotics Process Automation (RPA).
3. Scope & Updates
Microsoft continues to invest heavily in their data analytics range, which includes machine learning and AI capabilities, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and other capabilities. Besides direct investments into the Power BI Platform, other offers (i.e., Azure Synapse) are also being created or upgraded and typically integrate seamlessly with Power BI.
4. Pricing
The desktop version is free, allowing you to get started and experience the first potential benefits without having to commit to an expensive subscription. The cloud service offers rich functionalities and makes it easy to share knowledge and insights with others.
