Introduction to Power BI

 

Power BI Introduction

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Whether your data is a simple Microsoft Excel workbook, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses, Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize (or discover) what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Power BI is simple and fast, capable of creating quick insights from different sources of data like an Excel workbook or a local database. Power BI is robust and enterprise-grade, ready not only for extensive modeling and real-time analytics, but also for custom development. Power BI can be your personal report and visualization tool, but can also serve as the analytics and decision engine behind group projects, divisions, or entire corporations.

Power BI Edition's

• Microsoft Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop 
• An online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service 
• Mobile Power BI apps that are available on any device, with native mobile BI apps for Windows, iOS, and Android.

A common flow of work in Power BI begins in Power BI Desktop, where a report is created. That report is then published to the Power BI service and finally shared, so that users of Power BI Mobile apps can consume the information.

Power BI  Common flow of Activity

Power BI generally follow a common flow. The common flow of activity looks like this:

• Bring data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report.
• Publish to the Power BI service, where you can create new visualizations or build dashboards.
• Share dashboards with others, especially people who are on the go.
• View and interact with shared dashboards and reports in Power BI Mobile apps.

You might spend all your time in the Power BI service, viewing visuals and reports that have been created by others. And that's fine. Someone else on your team might spend their time in Power BI Desktop, which is fine too. To help you understand the full continuum of Power BI and what it can do, we'll show you all of it. Then you can decide how to use it to your best advantage.