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Power BI

What is Power BI?

Power BI is increasingly being referred to as a tool that has enhanced business decision-making. Could Power BI help you too, is your business not immune to the wrong decisions either? What exactly is Power BI, what is it's purpose and how is it better than other tools?

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Power BI is used for reporting automation, deep dive analysis and finding business insight in a timely manner, all in order to improve decision-making in the company.

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Since most of business analysts use regular Excel (without Power tools) to create their reports, it is interesting to see the advantages Power BI offers compared to regular Excel:

  • Time needed to refresh reports: in regular Excel a lot of time is being used on repetitive manual data manipulation, while in Power BI all this is done with one click on refresh button - significant time saving

  • Visualization: Power BI has significantly bigger interactive visualization possibilities

  • Sharing and availability: Power BI has the possibility of publishing reports in the cloud, sharing with colleagues while also being available on mobile phones. Regular Excel is not developed to the same level

  • Calculation speed: as the number of rows increases, regular Excel becomes slower than Power BI (Power BI is specifically designed to be able to manipulate large amounts of data)

  • Capacity: regular Excel can not load more than a million rows, while Power BI has no such limitations (only depends on hardware)

  • Stability: Power BI is much more stable than Excel – doesn't get stuck

  • Number of errors: Power BI has much less formulas than Excel (Excel has a formula in each cell, Power BI does not). Accordingly, there is much less errors and it is much easier to debug

  • Security: Power BI has security on much higher standards and different levels of access that can be applied to different users, Excel does not have such possibilities

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Compared to traditional BI, main advantage of Power BI is greater agility because it is intended to be used by all business users, not just developers (so called self-service BI), so iterations for development are much faster.

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Example of Power BI visualization

Power BI tools and phases we use them in

In technical terms, Power BI is set of tools with an extremely large scope: from gathering and transforming raw data, through designing data models with calculations, to interactive visualization and sharing information. This toolkit can be used through both applications: Excel and Power BI Desktop.

 

Main features Power BI:

  • wide range of tools in one application (otherwise more applications would need to be used)

  • "no code/low code" philosophy - which means it is intended for business users and developers are not needed

  • exceptional interactive visualization

  • available in cloud and on mobile phone

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Power BI process is divided into three phases:

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Phase 1 is used for:

  • retrieving raw data form production systems (Extract)

  • transforming this data, changing the number of rows and columns in the table and initial data processing (Transform)

  • inserting arranged tables into the data model (Load)

that is, in one word - ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) official term in IT world.

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Power BI tool used in this phase is called Power Query (that is the name in both Excel and Power BI Desktop). Power Query belongs to the category of "no code" programs, which means that it can be used without knowledge of programming language (although programming language M can be seen in the background).

With Power Query, business user can replace using SQL and Visual Basic (VBA) which are intended for developers.

Phase 2 is used for:

  • data model design - merging tables into a relation model

  • making calculations (calculation columns and measures)

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Power BI tool used in this phase is called Power Pivot (in Excel, while in Power BI Desktop it has no special name). Power Pivot belongs to category of "low code" programs, meaning it suits business users in a similar way as regular Excel does -  knowledge of professional developer is not required for this program to be used. Power Pivot is also very similar to Excel because it has taken over almost all Excel functions and added more of its own (all this functions now go by one name, DAX). Power Pivot is the "brain" of the report.

Phase 3 is used to create interactive visualization.

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Power BI tools used in this stage are called Power View and Power Map (in Excel, they have no special name in Power BI Desktop). Visualization belongs to the category of „no code” programs, meaning it is suited to business users in a way everything is done by clicking on icons and entering parameters.

Excel's tools Power View and Power Map are being used less and less, so all visaulizations are mostly done in Power BI Desktop, where reports are both published and shared with other users.

How much does Power BI cost?

Financially, there are three models of using Power BI:

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Power BI Desktop - Free:

  • Price: Free

  • Purpose: all features, but for personal use, no sharing with other users through the cloud

 

Power BI Pro license:

  • Price: 9,99 USD monthly per user

  • Purpose: sharing and collaboration with other users through the cloud (both author and reader need to have Pro license), shared processor and memory resources in the cloud

 

Power BI Premium licence:

  • Price: min 4.995 USD monthly per assigned resource in the cloud

  • Purpose: enterprise BI, big data, in the cloud and locally, assigned processor and memory resources provide stability and greater data size, everyone can read without additional licenses, authors need to have Power BI Pro license

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