What is Power BI?
Power BI is Microsoft’s premier data visualisation tool and is the main reason why Microsoft has consistently been ranked as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for much of the last decade. Not only can you build beautiful, insightful reports with Power BI, but thanks to Power BI’s capability to automate time consuming data cleaning tasks it can truly transform teams’ repetitive data work, making teams much more efficient, giving teams the ability to focus on tasks that truly add value.
It works by transforming hundreds to millions of rows of data into easy to understand and attractive visualisations like pie charts, line graphs, waterfalls and many others.
If you or your team are creating analysis or reports in Excel, then I cannot recommend Power BI highly enough as a way to save a significant amount of time and generate insights.
Who will benefit from learning Power BI?
Being able to use Power BI will benefit a lot of people, but at FDTC, we’ve drawn up a character profile of the person that we think will get the most out of learning about this brilliant software.
- Performs work repetitively in Excel such as creating reports, analysis, reconciliations, journal preparation etc
- Spends time sending versions of the same Excel files to different stakeholders
- Spends time repetitively cleaning and transforming datasets in spreadsheets
- Is frustrated that their job revolves around maintaining spreadsheets
- Has or is part of a team that has complicated reports that need lots of instructions on how to complete
- Builds reports by combining different files or datasets from different systems
- Is frustrated by slow opening and responding spreadsheets
- Wants to be able to analyse more than data than the 1 million Excel row limit permits
- Is frustrated by lack of dynamic function building in PivotTables
Power BI can solve all of these problems!
Interested?
If you have any of the problems to the left and would like to find out more about Power BI, then I’ve developed a free course designed to teach you the Power BI theory basics, show you how a completed report is put together and demonstrate the different parts of Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service.
How does Power BI work?
So how do we get Power BI to help us out with our working lives? We build a report! There are 5 steps to creating a Power BI report:
1) Connect to Data
2) Clean and transform data
3) Join different datasets together
4) Create charts from datasets
5) Share your reports
Once you’ve created your reports and you need to update them, then it’s so simple to refresh your reports. You literally just click a button called ‘Refresh’.
1. Connect to Datasets
Firstly, we connect Power BI to datasets. The datasets can be held in lots of different places ranging from an inbox on Microsoft Exchange to Analysis Services, through websites, Access, PDFs and literally hundreds of other options.
At the FDTC, we focus on teaching Power BI report creation through connection to Excel files by a variety of different means. As we are yet to come across a system that does not export data into Excel (they may exist!), we have found through practical experience that this is the easiest and fastest way for newcomers to understand Power BI and get the most out of the software.
2. Clean Datasets
This step, right here, is the reason why learning Power BI will quickly pay off. Every day, every week, every month, Excel users are repetitively cleaning and transforming datasets for use in PivotTables or for static aggregation tables like SUMs or COUNTs. They’re spending 10 mins here, a half hour there removing columns, adding columns, using LOOKUPS to grab information from other datasets, copying and pasting data and so on. In this step, we teach Power BI those transformational steps so that it can perform the transformation for us each and every time, we need to do clean the data to make it useful.
3. Join Datasets Together
Frequently a base dataset hasn’t got all the information that we need and we have to grab some information in from other datasets. Power BI makes it really easy to bring data from different places either through merging or by using relationships.
Both options are much faster than LOOKUP functions and, depending on the situation, come with added benefits!
4. Create Charts from Datasets
Once you have your datasets joined together, then you create your graphs and charts (called ‘Visualisations’). To create a visualisation, firstly, we select the visualisation that we want from a list. We then select the data that we want to use in the visualisation from another list.
Just two mouse clicks and we’ll have a visualisation!
To create a report, just put together all the visualisations that you need.
5. Share Reports Online
Once we’ve created our report, then we can share it so that others can benefit from its insights or it useful dataset. If you have Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium then you can post reports online to the Power BI Service and arrange them into folders called apps so that anyone can see the report.
Reports can be protected so that only certain users can see reports or see certain parts of reports. Set up automated refreshing, check how people are interacting with your reports, build reports from datasets that others have posted online and much more. If you don’t have Pro or Premium, then save your report online but not share it, or save the report to a shared drive, Sharepoint or OneDrive.
One Click Report Refresh
To refresh your Power BI report for new data, all you need to do is update the connected dataset and click on the Refresh button. It takes 2 minutes – often not even that long.
Power BI then deals with the data transformations of the new datasets, the joining of the datasets, the creation of the visualisations, everything. Meanwhile you have a cuppa.
Ready to get started?
A free 1 hour course to find out more about the different parts of Power BI, see a finished report up close in the flesh (on the screen) and understand how it’s put together. By the end of the course you’ll have enough to go off and start experimenting with Power BI yourself.
This 7 hour course that builds on Introduction to Power BI by teaching the basic elements of Power BI and then guiding you through creating a beginner report. You’ll then be guided through a second more complex report to get started on your Power BI Journey.
A complete 18 hour course building on Getting Started With Power BI that teaches the basics of Power BI and then guides you through the creation of 4 varied reports ranging from beginner to advanced, combining Power BI theory with report writing and error fixing practice
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