Power BI Modelling, Visualisation and Publishing

(The following is a text version of our Power BI infographic)

Power Bl is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights through data visualisation. It connects to hundreds of data sources, simplifies data preparation and easily produces beautiful reports. It sounds an attractive prospect, but why should you use data visualisation to present your business information?

Data Visualisation

Data visualisation takes many forms, but one of the most popular is 'info-graphics'. These combine text and visualised data to present a visual story, and have been shown to be a very effective means of communication:

Infographics help you remember

On average, people remember:

• 80% of what we see
• 20% of what we read
• 10% of what we hear

We are visual creatures, and ingesting content in visual form means it is more likely to be retained.

Visual is the most effective medium

90% of all the information transmitted to the brain is visual, and it is processed 60,000 times faster than text. This makes it by far the most effective means of communication.

Infographics help improve engagement

On average, users read only 28% of words on a page, so two thirds of your message may be missed. Infographics are so much easier to digest that they are 30 times more likely to be read than an article. According to one study, presentation including visual content was 17% more convincing than one without.

Why use Power BI to visualise your data?

Import from almost any data source

Unlike a lot of other data visualisation products on the market, Power Bl has been built by a huge team at Microsoft. One of the main aims, and a feature that almost all others lack, is the integration of outside data sources. As well as an Open Database Connectivity function, it also seamlessly pairs with cloud content like Google Analytics, SalesForce, GitHub, Mail Chimp, SharePoint and hundreds more online software service providers. There are also new (less mainstream) connectors being developed all the time.

A brand-new visualisation engine

As mentioned previously, an enormous team has been at work on Power Bl, and Microsoft has dedicated a lot of resources to it. Amongst the new features is a brand new D3 based, HTML 5 compliant, visualisation engine that is just amazing. For example, you can see a bar chart that shows performance by year, then drill down on the bar chart to see the monthly, weekly or daily breakdown, or chart complex moving visuals in 3D Everything is intuitive and simply works.

Open source and custom visualisations

A big step forward with Power Bl is also the visualisation library. The range of different visualisation techniques and options within them is now vast, but they have also shared the visualisation source code so that developers can create their own, and share them with the community. In turn this leads to an ever-expanding library of open source visualisations, and this is a huge bonus!

Power Bl has mobile apps

One of the benefits of starting from scratch is you have no legacy to carry around. Microsoft has built mobile apps for Apple and Android (and Windows mobile of course), and they work very well!

Integration with Excel and PowerPoint

The truth is that most businesses rely on both Excel and PowerPoint to tell stories. Hence, integration between Power Bl and these other Microsoft cornerstones is highly desirable, PowerPoint compatibility is still rather limited, whilst Excel is much more complete and almost seamless. As Power Bl has been a big success, expect further integration to come in the future.

Sources:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

https://wwwnngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/

https://reasondigital.com/insights/lo-reasons-to-use-infographics/

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/effectiveness-infographics