Unlock powerful data insights with Microsoft Power BI

Businesses have a lot of data at their fingertips, but unless you are using that information to make informed decisions, you are not using it to your full advantage. It’s essential to use a data insights tool to help harness the power of your data. Microsoft Power BI stands out as a leading tool in the realm of business intelligence, offering robust features that transform raw data into actionable insights.

As a Business Data Analyst, I am a huge advocate for Power BI. The great thing about it is that you can use it for any type of business, for example, Financial Services, Logistics, or Legal. If you have a lot of data that you need to report on, whether it’s held in a database or various Excel spreadsheets, it can turn your data into informative dashboards instead of creating Excel graphs and charts.

I’m often asked questions about Power BI, such as: What is it? Is it a good analytics tool? Can’t I just use Excel to create graphs? Is it easy to use? 

Let's dive into what makes Power BI an essential asset for any organisation.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics tool designed to analyse data and share insights. Through its visually appealing dashboards and reports, it can bring your business data to life. This can help you to view live data about how well your business is performing, areas for improvement, and potential opportunities.

Data is a powerful tool that, once unlocked, can be monumental for your business. Power BI integrates seamlessly with various data sources, including Excel, SQL Server, and cloud-based services like Azure, Google Analytics, and many more.

Some key features include:

• Interactive Dashboards: Power BI allows you to create dynamic and interactive dashboards that provide a real-time view of business metrics and KPIs.

• Data Connectivity: Power BI can connect to various external data sources. Whether your data is stored on-premises or in the cloud, Power BI can access and integrate it, providing a unified view of your business data.

• Advanced Analytics: Get even more from your data with advanced features like AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and machine learning models. These tools help uncover hidden patterns and trends in your data, enabling more accurate forecasting and decision-making.

• Collaboration and Sharing: Power BI makes it easy to share reports and dashboards with colleagues and stakeholders. They can then be accessed from any device, meaning your team has access to the latest insights in real time, when they need them.

• Security and Compliance: Microsoft Power BI offers robust security features to protect your data. With role-based access control, data encryption, and compliance with industry standards, you can be confident that your data is secure.

Real-life use cases

There are so many ways that Power BI can help a business. Real-time dashboards could be displayed on screens around the office so that each department can see their key metrics and if they are hitting them. These dashboards could also be viewed from your phone, meaning you have the data available at your fingertips as and when you need it. This helps keep everyone in the loop and working towards the same target:

• Senior Management- Can create KPI dashboards to track metrics like revenue, profit, loss, and EBITDA.
• Customer Service- Could use it to show how many open support tickets they have, how many they have closed, average call waiting times, and satisfaction scores.
• Sales Managers - Use it to monitor the team’s performance with visuals of the sales pipeline, open opportunities, lost business, revenue generated, and top sales performers.

All dashboards can be fully branded to your company's look and feel with your brand colours, fonts, and logo. 

Below is an example Power BI dashboard. It shows what could be created for an industry vertical like Financial Services. Delve into the breakdown of clients, including factors like age, occupation, types of policies held, and amount of assets held:

Visuals – ways to display your data

For those that love a chart or graph, Power BI offers a wide range of visuals to help you present your data in a meaningful and engaging way. These visuals can be customised and combined to create interactive and insightful reports and dashboards. Here are some of the key types of visuals available:

• Standard Visuals

Various standard charts that can be used to visualise your data to show trends, compare values, display percentages, and show key metrics, including Bar, Column, Line, Area, Combo Charts, Funnel, Pie, and Donut charts. Plus, Tables, Matrices, and Cards.

• Advanced Visuals 

Advanced capabilities show relationships between variables, help to visualise geographical data, display hierarchical data, and more using Scatter, Bubble, Gauge, and Waterfall charts, Maps, and Tree maps.

• Custom Visuals

Power BI also supports custom visuals, which can be created or imported from the Microsoft AppSource marketplace. Some popular custom visuals include Word Cloud to visualise text data, Gantt and Sankey charts for project timelines and relationships between entities. As well as Chiclet slicer to create filter buttons and a useful Infographic Designer.

• AI-Powered Visuals

Clever AI functionality allows you to ask questions and get answers in the form of visuals with Q&A Visual, as well as features like Key Influencers and Decomposition. 

One of my favourite features of Power BI is the Map visual. It is a very versatile and powerful tool for visualising geographic data. This allows users to transform complex datasets into intuitive, interactive visuals that highlight spatial relationships and trends. With options ranging from basic maps to advanced ArcGIS and Azure Maps, Power BI caters to various needs, whether it's simple data point plotting or sophisticated geospatial analysis.

The ability to customise map styles, drill down into geo-hierarchies, and integrate with other data sources makes Power BI maps an invaluable tool for businesses looking to gain insights from their geographic data. Overall, the mapping capabilities in Power BI enhance data storytelling and decision-making processes significantly.

Below is an example of how a Map visual could be used for a Financial Services organisation, to show the sum of assets held by clients in a particular geographical area:

Conclusion

I find there’s something really satisfying about working with Power BI. Data cleaning is fast and intuitive, and once you’ve got everything ready for visualisation, it’s fun to drag and drop data into different chart types and see what kind of patterns you can uncover.

As it’s a tool for creating presentations and dashboards too, it’s satisfying to make charts look professional. Plus, the built-in tools for sharing reports and dashboards (including mobile-friendly versions) mean that you can show off the fruits of your labour. It’s great to see the tremendous impact that Power BI has had on our clients’ businesses.

Overall, Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool that empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions. Its user-friendly interface, extensive data connectivity, and advanced analytics capabilities make it an invaluable asset for any organisation. By leveraging Power BI, you can unlock the full potential of your data and drive your business forward.

Like the sound of Power BI as a data insight tool for your business, but don’t have the resource in-house to get started? Our data experts would love to help. We can support you to turn your data into useful, real-time dashboards, giving your team the insight they need to make informed decisions.

Contact us today for an informal chat and get one step closer to unlocking your data potential.