Why Should you Choose Power BI as your Business Intelligence Solution?

Microsoft Power BI is a SaaS-based business intelligence tool that helps you to extract meaningful insights from data, but it doesn’t stop there. You can also share and collaborate on reports with other users within your organization or even with other users outside your organization.

You can pull data from various sources to obtain powerful yet useful insights out of it. You can view the same data from multiple angles to get a better understanding, and the unprecedented interactive visualizations might help you to elicit new perspectives towards the end goal.

Let us discuss some of the widely appreciated advantages of Power BI that makes it a successful Business Intelligence tool.

User Experience

We all know that it’s always “The simpler, the better.” With Power BI, anyone from your organization can create custom reports and dashboards without seeking help from a technical person or a developer. The drag-and-drop functionality is familiar to use and requires less effort to create, arrange, and present chunks of information more easily in minutes. It is just the tip of the iceberg, and we will be discussing more in the upcoming sections.

Microsoft also offers cross-platform support, making it possible for everyone to access and visualize the reports with whatever device they have. Power BI Desktop, for Microsoft Windows; Power BI service, an online SaaS; and the Power BI mobile app, for smartphones or tablets running Windows, iOS, or Android.

Data Source

No matter whether you are a small local company or a large enterprise, data helps in every stage of the decision-making process. With that in mind, many leading organizations are insisting to visualize the data and process it before making a decision. A tool that supports data from a wide range of data sources can be more productive and helpful, making Power BI a one-stop-shop for everyone. Using Microsoft Power BI, you can not only import data from best-known databases but also can hook up with information from many alternative sources.

When you click “Get data” in Power BI, it shows you all the available data connections. It allows you to connect to different flat files, SQL databases, and Azure Cloud or even web platforms such as Facebook, Google Analytics, and Salesforce objects. It also includes an ODBC connection to connect to other ODBC data sources, which are not listed. For the complete list of available data sources, you can visit Power BI data sources.

Personalized Dashboard

Microsoft Power BI empowers team members to discover insights hidden in your data, allowing you to make more informed decisions based on real data. One of the key features of the tool is that you can customize the dashboard depending on your need. You can share the dashboard by having control over who gets to see and interact with the reports. You can also embed the reports with other applications to provide a unified user experience.

You can create interactive reports and custom dashboards, which can also be exported as a PowerPoint document or can be accessed via an access link. The best part is that whenever there is a change in the database, the data and reports are always updated in real-time, reducing the time invested in the analysis, and certainly simplifies and streamlines the decision-making process.

Cost

There are three pricing plans available (Free, Pro, and Premium) as of 2020:

Power BI Desktop: This level is free for individual users and includes data cleaning and preparation, author reports and prepare, model, and create data visualizations, with the ability to publish to the Power BI service.

Power BI Pro: The Pro plan costs $9.99/user/month. It includes data collaboration with colleagues, data governance, build and share dashboards with a 360-degree real-time view and the ability to publish reports anywhere, and perform ad hoc analysis. You can try it as a free trial for 60 days before purchasing the subscription.

Power BI Premium: The Premium plan starts at $4,995 a month, per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource with annual subscription. This is recommended exclusively for organizations to read and interact with pre-published dashboards and reports with either a per-user Power BI Pro license or a Power BI Premium license for large-scale databases.

Power BI Community

The online community has also grown significantly, where they all share ideas on building dashboards and help integrate the environment seamlessly with advanced cloud services like Cognitive services, Cortana or Bot framework. As of 2016 Power BI has over 5 million subscribers and is used by over 200,000 organizations and their service is available in 44 languages. They now have Spanish speaking community forum which helps the Spanish speaking people to learn, find answers to questions, as well as contribute their opinion to other people’s questions. Also, you can customize your own visual reports using the Power BI API, and make them available on GitHub.

Businesses that foresee the fundamental value of data and know how to extract and use it in the right way, are the ones who are highly rewarded and are of more use to society, since in this modern world, data is more valuable than ever. We’re in a digital economy where information is everything and with the right tools in hand; it helps companies make more informed decisions, making it a source of great value for them.

We, at TechAffinity have seasoned Power BI professionals who can make data analysis a simpler process for you to make more informed decisions. Feel free to shoot your queries to media@techaffinity.com or schedule a meeting with our experts.