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30 Reasons You Should Be Considering Power BI – Part 2

A lot of people out there think that the story of Power BI is too good to be true.
Here is a list of the reasons that wE think you should consider Power BI as a self-service and/or Enterprise Business Intelligence Solution.

 

Power BI has mobile apps

Microsoft have released mobile applications that are free for Windows, Apple and Android.

You can subscribe via email

Most of us would like a static report to appear in our inbox every morning when we power up. All you need to go is to your report tab, click ‘subscribe via email’ and each day you will receive a nicely formatted PDF ready for printing. However these reports are so much better when you have full interactivity.

Power BI can be embedded into your own custom apps

When working from the ground up, you’ll always have the option of designing your own architecture around it. So if you want to build your own website and set user access via your own logon credentials, then that will not be an issue for Microsoft.

Strategic decision making
Strategic decision making
Power BI is extremely competitively priced

It’s free to try for as long as you want, however, If you want to take advantage of all the enterprise features such as automatic refreshes, controlled sharing of data, then all you’ll have to pay is a whole $9.99 per month.

Power BI is easy to use and cheap to train users

It’s intuitive and easy to learn for most users. The training costs are low and learner adoption is rapid making the total cost of ownership quite a compelling case.

Power BI has a modelling engine that power users can learn

Power BI is subsequently enabling a culture of self service which is breeding a new generation of ‘developers’ who use the Vertipaq engine. Power BI uses a language called DAX, this is a functional language that can be learned by excel professionals

Power BI has data loading tools that power users can learn

Power query is so easy to use, it’s almost embarrassing to the skilled developers out there.

Power BI is self-service BI

Power BI is self service BI personified. Any competent excel user can learn and use these tools allowing them to become semi self-sufficient in their analytics and reporting.

Except when it is not self-service BI

Power BI has the foundations strengths of an enterprise strength tool whilst being simultaneously a self-service capable tool all at once.

Power BI has got consolidation dashboards

Power BI is amongst other things a data source aggregator – it doesn’t matter where the data originates from – all you have to do is to click on the link, graph, bar to view the information.

Learn more…

Power BI is an example of one of the many technical and professional development courses we offer at STL – check out our course finder to learn more. Alongside the technical skills needed to produce Power BI reports, you may also consider attending core soft skills like our presentation training, which can help make detailed reports more engaging and interesting to the audience.

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5 reasons to switch reporting from Excel to Power BI

For many years, Microsoft Excel has been the tried and tested reporting tool for many businesses. In 2019. more and more organisations are turning to Power BI as an alternative with its strong analytics and reporting functions.

Microsoft BI training courses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With faster visualisations, statistical functions and calculations across broad datasets, it’s obvious that Power BI can deliver a far greater insight than excel. Let’s take a deeper look at just how Power BI and Excel compare:

 Access and store a large amount of data

Power BI has an impressive compression ability for Microsoft Excel and text/csv files which allow you to analyse and visualise huge quantities of data. Most devices would struggle to open a 300GB file which would make reporting in Excel a challenge.

Could you imagine having all your files saved, stored, thoroughly analysed and all taking up only 50MB? This is now a reality with Power BI by using the powerful compression algorithms to import the cache within the PBIX file.

Identify data trends quickly and easily

The analysis of trends with Power BI is easy. It comes equipped with built in time intelligence features, you can view vast amounts of data in seconds. You can also create a date dimension table in seconds and allows you to allow the time intelligence functions to work.

Intuitive UX Features

 A real gem about Power BI is that it is very straightforward to make something aesthetically pleasing with limited abilities around creativity. Old favourites like drag & drop, resizing and copy & paste will make any Microsoft Office user feel right at home.

Incredible Cloud Based Features

 When you have completed the initial building of your Power BI analysis tool, it’s time to share/publicise. With Excel, this would typically involve circulating a large file, placing a master copy on a shared drive or on SharePoint. But with Power BI, this has now been somewhat revolutionised. It is now publicised to the secure Microsoft Hosted Cloud Service called Power BI Service which automates the refreshing of our underlying data.

Row Level Security Features

 Adding RLS features was historically somewhat complicated in Excel but is now more straightforward and can be done by non-coders. An example of this would be employees only being able to see rows of data which is applicable to their geography. The addition of these filters is simple, and it eliminates the risk of other parties from viewing data that they should not be privy to.

Conclusion

Power BI is an easy tool to use that can rapidly propel an organisations culture into a data driven. These newfound abilities amongst data users mean less reliance on IT support for the sourcing, transformation and analysis of data. However Excel will still be the ubiquitous business tool (you can check out some Excel training courses for your development) just a lot of the heavy analysis can now shift to Power BI.

In this new data driven age, it is important for organisations to apply intelligence on how they best utilise their data to stay abreast of the revolution and respond appropriately to customer needs.