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Power BI Modelling, Visualisation and PublishingPower BI Modelling, Visualisation and Publishing

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Learning & Development Resources

Blog

Infographics

Why should you use Power BI for your business?

(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

Training manual sample

Below are some extracts from our Power BI Modelling, Visualisation and Publishing manual.

       ·          Desktop, Service and Mobile

       ·          Installing and setting up Power BI

       ·          Setting up a MS Power BI account

 

Power BI Desktop is a tool created by Microsoft as part of its BI (Business Intelligence) toolset. Other tools include Excel, SQL, SharePoint and various reporting services. Power BI Desktop is an analysis and reporting tool designed to connect to data, transform it, analyse it and then create an output referred to as a visualization.

With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple data sources, use queries, filters and calculations to build a view of the data (shaping, transforming or modelling). The model is then used to create output in the form of reports. The reports can be published to Power BI in Office 365 if appropriate technology is also in place, and interactive dashboards can be created.

Power BI Desktop files have a .pbix extension and Power BI Desktop files can be shared like any other file.


Desktop, Service and Mobile

The different Power BI technologies and their key features are listed below. Power BI Desktop is free, but the other technologies need some form of subscription through the Office 365 service. Power BI Pro costs extra and is used most by organisations for their reporting and dashboard requirements.

Technology

Key Features

Power BI

·       Part of Office 365

·       Cloud based

·       Mostly used for sharing and collaborating

·       Reports can be built here too, although usually the reports are created in Power BI desktop

·       No data transformation available

Power BI Desktop

·       Installed locally on a user’s machine

·       Users create, view and work with reports

·       Users can transform data here but cannot create dashboards

·       The reports created here are generally published to the Power BI service

Power BI Mobile

·       Mobile and tablet app that can be used to view reports on any connected device

Power BI Pro

·       Cloud based

·       Makes all the Power BI capabilities available, plus sharing, Excel and PowerPoint analytics

  

Installing and setting up Power BI

Power BI Desktop can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store on any machine with a Windows operating system.

Install Power BI Desktop:

·       Click on the Start button in the Task Bar

·       Type ‘Store’ and click the Microsoft Store application

·       Click Search and enter ‘Power BI Desktop’

·       Click the Power BI Desktop App icon to start the installation

·       Follow the on-screen instructions

·       You just installed Power BI Desktop on your machine

Setting up a MS Power BI account

Supported email addresses

Power BI requires that you use a work or school email address to sign up. You can't sign up using email addresses provided by consumer email services or telecommunication providers. This includes outlook.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, and others.

After you sign up, you can invite guest users to see your Power BI content with any email address, including personal accounts.

You can sign-up for Power BI with .gov or .mil addresses, but this requires a different process.

Sign up for a Power BI account

Go to the sign-up page using the following web address
https://signup.microsoft.com/signup?sku=a403ebcc-fae0-4ca2-8c8c-7a907fd6c235

·       Enter your email address then select Sign up.

·       If you get a message like this one, choose an option to receive a verification code, then continue to the next step in this procedure.

·       If you get a message like this one, finish the steps to sign in and use Power BI.

·       Enter the code that you received then select Sign up.

·       Check your email for a message like this one.



 

·       On the next screen, enter your information and the verification code from the email. Select a region, review the policies that are linked from this screen, then select Start.



·       You are then taken to Power BI sign in page, and you can begin using Power BI.



·       You just signed up for a Power BI account

  

·       Visualisation and Fields Panes

·       Create visualisations with Report View

·       Sort and format data with Data View

Visualisation and Fields Panes





Power BI Desktop is organised the same way as other Microsoft applications. The Ribbon has groups or sections, where you have access to the tools. Power BI Desktop has 3 views - Report view, Data view, and Model view.


 

In Report View (screenshot above) we have access to the Visualizations pane and the Fields pane. These panes are displayed to the right-hand side of the report view by default.

Use the Visualizations pane to add visuals to the report page. Once added, the visualizations pane displays ‘Buckets’, which are placeholders where we can add fields from the ‘Fields’ pane located to the very right-hand side of the report view. The Fields pane displays the data sources and can be renamed for the clarity of the report by simply double-clicking the field’s name and change it. Any changes made to the fields in the report will never be written back to the data source.

Additionally, the Visualizations pane has a ‘Format section’ and an ‘Analytics’ section which you will familiarise yourself with during the course.

Create visualisations with Report View

Later in the course there is a whole unit dedicated to Visualisations in Power BI. Here is a quick overview of the main steps involved in adding visuals to a report page and providing them with data from the Fields pane.

Create visualisations

·       You connected to data (covered in the next unit) and you are in Report View

·       Select the Clustered Column Chart visual  (fourth image in the first row)

·       A place holder becomes visible on the screen and the Visualizations pane shows some buckets


·       Drag a field to be placed in the Axis Bucket

·       Drag a field into the Value Bucket

·       You just created a Clustered Column visual on the report page

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