What is BI?

Business intelligence is a technology-driven method which helps you to analyze data and to provide actionable information which helps corporate executives, business managers, and other users to make informed business decisions.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tool which helps you to convert data from various data source into interactive dashboards and BI reports. It provides multiple software connectors and services.

Different Power BI version like Desktop, Service-based (SaaS), and mobile Power Bi apps are used for different platforms.

In this Power BI tutorial, you will learn all the important concepts of Power BI and develop a foundational understanding of how to use Power BI tool.

Why use Power BI?

Here, are the most prominent reasons for using Power BI tool:

Pre-built dashboards and reports for SaaS Solutions

Power BI allows real-time dashboard updates.

Offers Secure and reliable connection to your data sources in the cloud or on-premises

Power BI offers Quick deployment, hybrid configuration, and secure environment.

Allows data exploration using natural language query

Offers feature for dashboard visualization regularly updated with the community.

History of Power BI

Power BI was conceptualized by Ruler and Dhers Netz of the SQL server coverage services team at Microsoft.

It was designed by West Chadic George in the year 2010 and named as a Project Crescent.

In 2011, It was bundled with SQL Server Codenamed Mount McKinley.

Microsoft unveiled the first preview to Power BI in September 2014.

The first version of Power BI released on 24 July 2015. It was based on Excel Based Add-ins like Power Query, Pivot, view, and Map.

Architecture of Power BI

Data Integration:

An organization needs to work with data which comes from different sources which can be in various file formats. The data should be extracted from a different source which can be from different servers or databases. This data is integrated into one standard format in a common staging area.

Data Processing:

In this stage, the integrated data is still not prepared for visualization as the data needs processing. This data is pre-processed. For example, redundant values, missing values will be removed from the data set.

The business rule should be applied to the data when the data is cleaned. You can load that data back to Data Warehouse.

Data Presentation

Once the data is loaded and processed, it can be visualized much better with use of various visualization that Power Bi has to offer. Use of dashboard and report helps one represent data more intuitively. This visual report helps business end users to take business decision based on the insights.