Power BI can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to start, grow, and/or organize their business intelligence initiatives. It’s no surprise that Microsoft’s most well-respected product has been a huge success. In fact, Microsoft was named a leader within the “2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant of Analytics and BI Platforms” for the 14th consecutive year.
Then, what is the secret to Power BI’s uniqueness? Here are seven benefits to Power BI.
1. Power BI can provide Business Intelligence to All
Power BI has many benefits. It empowers all types of organizations to build data-driven cultures. A data-driven culture means that decisions are made on the basis of data, not gut feelings.
Power BI allows companies to accomplish this difficult task by seamlessly putting business information assets such as real-time dashboards and reports into the hands (if needed) of every employee in an organization. This allows an entire company to make decisions based only on reliable, real-time data.
Power BI currently supports two versions: Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service. Power BI Desktop comes completely free. Anyone can download it now and get started immediately. Power BI Desktop lets users connect to data, create reports and rich visualizations.
These reports can then be published (as dashboards), to the Power BI Service, which is the cloud version. You can publish reports as dashboards in the Power BI Service. Users can then consume them from any device.
2. Power BI Brings Data to LIFE (Interactivity).
Data is truly valuable when it offers useful business insights, and can tell stories that assist decision-makers in making better choices.
Power BI makes it simple to bring data to life. Power BI service users can connect to their data and choose from a variety visualisations (column chart, pie charts and bubble and heatmaps, scatter plots, and so on). You can use Power BI to create stories about your data and share insights.
Power BI makes it easy to implement these visualizations. Power BI’s functionality also allows you to drag-and-reposition visuals to create clear, organized reports and dashboards.
These visualizations can be interactive as well, which is a big benefit of Power BI. You can filter reports and dashboards, then see how your visualizations adjust and update in seconds. All this to get more insight into your data.
3. Secure Power BI
Power BI provides a wide range of security features that can be used to protect sensitive information as well as meet compliance and security standards. Power BI makes use of Microsoft’s Cloud App Security feature. It “provides rich transparency, control over data movement, and sophisticated analysis to identify and combat cyberthreats across any Microsoft or third-party cloud services.”
Power BI’s sensitivity labels feature also makes it easy to notify users and consumers about what information/data is sensitive. Encryption features are available in this popular Microsoft product to further protect your data.
Power BI’s row security (RLS), allows developers to create and define different roles for different users. This security feature is extremely useful for organizations that need data to be only seen by specific employees or groups.
4. Power BI connects easily to many data sources
I won’t waste too much time on this Power BI benefit. The data analytics platform is robust and can connect to myriad data sources. These include file data sources like Excel, CSV, Snowflake, Oracle database, and online data sources like Salesforce Analytics and Adobe Analytics.
Power BI’s integration to Excel is also excellent. This allows you to “transfer all of your Excel queries and data models to Power BI easily, without learning a new program or language.”
5. Power BI is equipped with Artificial Intelligence Capabilities
Power BI offers artificial intelligence capabilities, which allow users to extract more value and information from their data. Three powerful AI visualizations are available for developers to dig deeper into data to generate insights and identify possible trends.
6. Power BI is constantly being improved
Microsoft continues to invest in Power BI and show clear commitment to making it the best data analytics platform. The tool receives frequent updates and new features are added. Existing features are also frequently improved.
7. Power BI apps – A great way to share content
Power BI applications are the last Power BI benefits I’ll mention in this blog.
Power BI Apps are a great way for report writers to share Power BI content with consumers.