Why use Power BI?
Power BI provides a simple setup to connect, transform, and visualize the raw business data from multiple sources. Even non-technical users can extract valuable information from their business data and use it to make better decisions. It provides a secure cloud service that enables the user to view dashboards, reports and share them with other business users and stakeholders in real-time analysis.
Power BI provides AI features in the form of Power Query and Power Q&A. With Power Query, you can create the dashboards by simply typing in the columns and the visuals you want to include. While Power Q&A allows you to analyze your data by giving voice commands.
Small businesses can use Power BI Desktop to visualize their business data without spending their time and money in maintaining a separate team for data analysis.
Why are you interested in Power BI? What makes you think that Power BI would be a great career option?
A cloud-based data reporting and visualization tool, Power BI makes it possible for users to generate reports online. Once reports are generated, users can share them with their colleagues in their workplace. This aspect of Power BI makes it quite popular among business users. And therefore, Power BI is both an interesting and promising career option.
Mention the important features of Power BI.
Features of Power BI are many. The most notable ones are:
- It allows users to transform data into visuals and share those visuals with colleagues.
- It allows users to explore and analyze data from all sources (in an all-in-one view).
- It allows users to scale across organizations with built-in governance and security.
- Once an output is generated, users can display the same in multiple devices that are compatible with the Power BI application.
- With Power BI natural language processing or Power BI Q&A, users can perform queries on reports using simple English words.
Is Power BI free to use?
Well, users can use Power BI for free. However, the best of Power BI can be availed with the Power BI Pro Subscription account. This can be purchased from the Microsoft Store. The subscription account basically offers an enhanced version of several features that are available with the Power BI free account. Most business users use a subscribed account as it offers more data refreshes per day and other features as compared to the free version.
What are the versions of Power BI?
Power BI currently comes in three versions:
- Microsoft Power BI Free/Desktop – This version is for users who want to get business insights from their data with visualizations.
- Microsoft Power BI Pro – This is the full version of Power BI. It allows users unlimited reporting, sharing, and viewing of reports.
- Microsoft Power BI Premium – This version provides a license for all users in an organization.
What is Power BI Desktop?
Power BI Desktop is a Windows desktop-based application for personal computers, primarily for designing, generating, and publishing reports to the cloud. Used as an on-premise version of Power BI, Power BI Desktop can run on PCs and work full-fledged even when the system is not connected to the Internet. Just when users want to publish their reports to the cloud or share with colleagues, they are supposed to connect to the Internet. Power BI Desktop is basically the first application that users jump into when they board on Power BI.
What are the major components of Power BI?
There are five different components of Power BI.
- Power Pivot: Fetches and cleans data and loads on to Power Query
- Power Query: Operates on the loaded data
- Power Q&A: Makes it possible for users to interact with reports using simple English language
- Power View: Lets users create interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals
- Power Map: Enables the processing of accurate geographic locations in datasets
How can we filter data in Power BI?
Data can be filtered using various filters that are available in Power BI, implicitly. There are basically three types of filters, namely, Page-level filters, Drillthrough filters, and Report-level filters.
- Drillthrough filters: With Drillthrough filters in Power BI Desktop, users can create a page in their reports that focuses on specific entities such as suppliers, customers, or manufacturers.
- Page-level filters: These are used to filter charts that are present on individual pages.
- Report-level filters: They are used to simultaneously filter charts that are present on all pages of a report.
MSBI vs Power BI
Below are the key Difference between the MSBI and Power BI:
| MSBI | Power BI |
| SSRS in MSBI is used to integrate the processing components and programming interfaces to test and share the reports on various devices. | Power Bi is a collection of BI tools and techniques that allows the user to create dashboards and reports by transforming the raw business data into visually interactive charts, maps, and graphs. |
| It cannot access the data from cloud storage. | Can access the data from both On-premise and cloud storage. |
| MSBI can handle large datasets without putting much stress on the computer systems. | Power BI can handle datasets of a maximum of 10MB or 33,000 rows. The user has to run direct queries if the data exceeds the limit. |
| SSRS in MSBI can only be used to create visualizations and reports. | Power BI is used to create data models, reports, and dashboards, which you can access and share via Power BI Apps and web browsers. |
Power BI vs Tableau
Below are some of the major differences beween Poer BI and Tableau:
| Power BI | Tableau |
| Power BI can handle a limited volume of datasets. | Can handle huge datasets without affecting the performance of the system. |
| Can be used by both naive and experienced users. | Used by experienced professionals for data analytics purposes. |
| Power BI has an easy-to-learn interface that helps the user to visualize the data and create reports. | The interface is difficult to understand by a non-technical user. |
| Provides an easy way for embedding the reports. | It’s a real-time challenge for embedding reports in Tableau. |
| Power BI uses Data Analysis Expression(DAX) to build formulas and expressions for measuring the columns. | Tableau uses Multidimensional Expressions(MDX) to create complex calculations and measure columns and dimensions. |
