Chapter 1 – Introducation of microsoft Power BI
The Power Bi Data Engine is a self service Business Intelligence tool Offered by Microsoft that reveals the core aspects of Microsoft different apps through the Power Bi Platform .It includes Power BI Desktop and Excel as well. It is the foundation of the individual analytics reports and dashboards can be built up by your own self-help to track the pattern of the business processes, data mining, and visualizations by Power BI .
Microsoft Power BI has 3 main components which are: Power BI Desktop , Power Bi Service and Power BI Apps .
Power BI Desktop :
Power BI Desktop is a free Desktop Application used for building and designing the reports.
Power BI Service:
Power BI Service is the online publishing services for viewing and sharing the reports and also dashboards.
Power BI Mobile Apps:
Power BI Mobile Apps is used for viewing the reports and dashboards on the go.
Moreover Power Bi has two other elements which are :
PB Report Builder : Power BI Report builder development tool allows us to interact with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services data sources and use the service of that purchase to create an report that can read by the Power Bi Service.
PB Report Server: Power BI Report Server is an on-premises server, and after reports have been created using Power Bi Desktop, the reports can be published on that server.
What is Business Intelligence ?
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology driven process that enables companies to analyze data and provide practical recommendations. This involves gathering raw data from diverse sources such as databases and spreadsheets, cleaning it up and turning it into something useful, then using complex tools such as statistical analysis, data mining or predictive modeling to probe its depths. Thereafter, the findings are put in dashboards, charts reports and graphs for simplification of complex information and identification of trends as well as insights. Stakeholders who gain business insight through visualization can make better decisions on improving corporate performances. This has been made easier than ever before due to applications like Tableau, Power BI and QlikView.
Why we use Power BI?
In a modern world where globalization has become a universal phenomenon, data has a central position, There are assumptions that companies must have a tool that helps them extract the inherent meaning of the big volume of data they produce by using it. Microsoft Power BI was given its project to cater to companies’ requirements, it is a data visualization and analysis software that spans analytics and reports throughout the organization.
Some of the benefits of Power BI are:
- Power BI Desktop is a free tool that lets you create reports.
- It integrates data from different sources easily.
- Handles vast amounts of data running into tens of hundreds millions of rows.
- Comes with an impressive Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language.
- Have unchangeable model’s data for security and integrity enhancement.
Comparison of Power BI with other BI tools:
In this section, a comparison is drawn between Power BI with other major Business Intelligence tools like Tableau, Excel and SSRS.
Tableau
While Power BI and Tableau are both business intelligence tools, and indeed a lot of the capabilities overlap between them, the two major key differentiators between these two are
Power BI works only on Windows, whereas Tableau works on both Windows and MacOS.
Pricing options differ between Power BI and Tableau; however, Tableau is generally more expensive in the majority of scenarios.
Excel
Much like Power BI, Excel is spreadsheet software that holds most of the native characteristics but poorly offers visualization options and further options for updating, sharing, and viewing reports and dashboards online.
SSRS
SSRS stands for SQL Server Reporting Services, which is a Microsoft-developed tool for creating data visualizations and reports, such as charts, tables, and graphs. It consists of a set of tools to create, distribute, and manage those reports. The tool gives insights into the information kept in SQL databases and fosters important and timely decisions based upon the reports generated by SSRS. This can also be used by experts, and by end-users.
Importing and Transforming the data in Power Bi Desktop:
Connect to data :There is a fairly extensive list of supported data sources and connections in Power BI, making it pretty easy to connect to any source of data of your choice. For this tutorial, we’re going to import some sample financial data provided by Microsoft to help learn Power BI.
First of all, you can download sample data and import it by selecting Excel as the data source, as was already mentioned in this tutorial. A window will pop up which previews what’s inside your Excel file. This allows you to select which table, or which Excel sheet you want to import. You can tell them apart because tables are indicated by this icon, and sheets are by this one. In general, it’s a bit better importing from tables since they are very structured in Excel—with headers and defined ends of row.
Step One :Open Power BI Desktop, From the Home menu, select Get Data, then Excel. Refer to the below screenshot for better understanding
Step Two: After selecting “Excel” in the data source option, a window will pop up that will show the Excel files on your device. Select any one of them.
Refer to the below screenshot for better understanding.
Step Three:A window will pop up where you will preview what is inside your Excel file.Then select the tables or sheets you want and click “Load” to load this data into Power BI Desktop.Refer to the below screenshot for better understanding.
Step Four:After loading data into Power BI Desktop, the Data view shows the table “Orders” with columns including “Row ID” and “Order Date”. All columns, such as “Category” and “Customer ID”, are listed in Data pane with a search box for easy navigation. There are also icons indicating data types—.sigma is for numeric fields. Column headers show dropdowns with both sort and filter options. See the screenshot below.
Step Five: After selecting the specific data from your datasets, select a bar chart from the pane below for visualization. The result will be displayed in the bar chart.Refer to the below Screenshot for better understanding.
Importing the data from relational databases.
Connection can be made through Power BI to various types of relational data sources. These are essentially databases where the information moderated is organized into tables. Each database table will have multiple columns, and every row will house some certain data entry.
If your business or organization uses relational databases for sales analysis, Power BI Desktop can directly connect to your relational databases; there is no need to export flat files. This type of connection is useful for monitoring business progress, trends, and forecasting sales, enabling budgeting and performance targets. Power BI Desktop supports various relational databases, both in the cloud and on-premises.