What is Power BI, why would you use it? What can it do? What are its different components and how can it be categorized? 

 
This article is an attempt to explain Power BI in a simple, conceptual manner. With the rapid changes, updates & enhancements that are happening with Power BI, some of the content might need some additional research from the reader. 

Power BI is an industry-leading tool & platform, adept at all phases of the data analytics process. 

The ABCs of Power BI:  

AUTHOR:

The first piece of Power BI is the ‘Authoring‘ component. The software needed to start getting the data in, modeling the data and building the visuals is called ‘Power BI Desktop‘. This powerful tool/software/application helps us with sourcing the data, shaping it, creating a data model and authoring visual components. A Power BI Developer is expected to be very proficient & knowledgeable with this tool.  

• Power BI Desktop allows us to fetch/source data from a growing list of systems, including sources with unstructured data. 

• Data is not always clean & modeled and is most times in a shape that does not render itself well for analytics. Power BI Desktop easily lets us clean/filter & also shape the data. 

• Additional columns can be joined or derived using the tools in the ‘Transform’ tab of Power BI Desktop (Power Query). 

• Using the power of Relationships, Measures & Calculated Columns, a semantic model can be created and optimized. 

• The final step in Power BI Desktop is to create visualizations on the Power BI report canvas. There are multiple out-of-the-box visualizations available which easily help us create insights. 

BROADCAST:

Once the report is authored, the next step is to broadcast or deploy it. There are 2 options: On-Prem (Within the firewall) or on the Cloud (PowerBI.com). Both these destinations can also host Paginated reports side-by-side with Power BI files. Using Power BI Workspaces and with appropriate permissions, Power BI content can be shared with departments and teams in a structured manner. 

• Once the visualization (report) is ready using Power BI Desktop, there are 2 options for deployment destination – On-Prem or the Cloud. 

• With an installation of Power BI Report Server, Power BI reports can be stored along side paginated SSRS reports, on-premises. 

• With a PowerBI.com license, Power BI reports can be deployed to the cloud in access-controlled workspaces, where additional analysis in Excel is possible.  

CONSUME:

Once the reports are deployed, users can consume the data as reports, dashboards and do some deeper analysis using Excel too. The concept of ‘Dashboards’ and Excel analysis is possible only on the cloud version.  

• Access to Power BI Reports can be controlled through Workspaces and Apps. 

• Viewing by users can be controlled using the concept of Dashboards. 

• The Dataset can be reused by other users on the cloud, to create additional visualizations. 

Why Power BI:  

• Microsoft Power BI has been leading the technology charts for a few years in the areas of Data Analytics & Business Intelligence. 

• Power BI is not just a visualization tool and can cover the entire gamut of Data Analytics. By limiting its definition as a Visualization software, one vastly undermines and limits the scope of its capabilities. 

• From data sourcing, shaping, cleaning, filtering, modeling, defining relationships, visualization, broadcasting, sharing, ad-hoc analysis, etc. Power BI is a highly effective & potent tool which can quickly help derive insights from our data. 

• In the area of Self-Service Analytics, Power BI proves to be a great arsenal which helps data domain experts, business leaders & even executives build meaningful visuals from almost any type of data. 

• According to industry experts, the learning curve for Power BI is considerably shorter than other tools. 

Pointers to keep in mind:  

1. Version of the Power BI Desktop software: Do keep in mind that, at this point, there are multiple Power BI Desktop downloads/Software for authoring Power BI reports for On-Prem and Power BI Service (Cloud). This is the link to download the install files for Power BI cloud.  
For creating Power BI reports optimized for the on-premises Power BI Report Server, use this link. In certain cases, PBIX files saved in one version cannot be easily transferrable to the other version or platform. 

2. Power BI Report Builder: PowerBI.com (Cloud) can also host Paginated reports (like SSRS reports) alongside Power BI PBIX files. To author Paginated Reports, a developer will need a software called Power BI Report Builder. 

3. Authoring from PowerBI.com: Once a dataset is deployed to the cloud, consumers can also create/author new Power BI reports from that data set, with the correct permissions. 

Conclusion:  

Power BI has been the leader in the Data Analytics & Business Intelligence field for many years (Gartner Link). True to its stature as an industry-leading platform, Power BI covers multiple aspects of Data Analytics & lends itself easy to handle, for a wide spectrum of stakeholders (data analysts, tech managers, developers, data domain experts, executives, etc.)  
All in all, Power BI has a rich set of BI features & has something for everyone in the enterprise. 

Click here to get a copy of the Power BI ABCs mind-map document.