Business Intelligence (BI) is a tool that presents numerous opportunities for businesses to enhance growth and drive greater profitability through smart analysis that drives digital transformation. These opportunities come in the form of actionable insights gathered from the transformation of data from a host of sources. These insights help organizations make more informed decisions for their business, which enhances organizational performance, competitiveness, and agility.
Microsoft’s Power BI is one of the many toolsets used within the Business Intelligence space. Power BI is a business analytics solution that is hosted on the cloud. It provides critical tools to extract important information from massive volumes of data across a variety of data sources. The interactive dashboards in Power BI enable key decision-makers to conduct queries, filter, and go above and beyond traditional reporting to extract previously unknown trends and hidden business opportunities. Power BI inherently does not require any large infrastructure support or investment. Users also do not require any highly specialized training in order to use the tool.
The Features and Benefits of Power BI
Some of the key features of Power BI are:
- Customized Dashboards – One of the major features in Power BI is the customizable dashboards. They can be personalized to meet an organization’s exact requirements. Dashboards that have the ability to host specific visualizations or the entire report can be created by the user as well. Users are free to customize the dashboard layout and its size according to their requirements. Dashboards that visualize metrics that are connected to other various data sources can also be easily created, allowing users to get the most out of the BI solution they have opted for.
- Power Query – Power Query is one of the most powerful BI solutions that come packaged in Power Bi. Power Query is Microsoft’s data connectivity and data preparation technology that enables users to access and use data from various data sources. Additionally, it also allows businesses to reshape the data to fit their needs while being easy to use, engaging, and promoting a no-code user experience.
- Easy Integration with Applications – Power BI seamlessly integrates with other modern enterprise-grade applications or legacy applications as well. This enables the BI solution to leverage all the data available in a visually enticing manner while facilitating powerful reporting and analytics capabilities.
- Robust Control and Security – Power BI provides row-level security that allows users to grant access rights on different levels, which promotes security and increases the usefulness of the BI report in general. Authorized personnel can view a report developed by a master only if they have access, which makes creating reports inexpensive and much simpler.
- A Promising Roadmap for the Future – With a release cycle that occurs monthly, Microsoft constantly updates and adds new features to Power BI. Microsoft intensely monitors the Power BI community’s feature requests and implements features that are the most requested.
CONCLUSION
Power BI is a simple and feature-rich BI solution that helps businesses to push themselves into the data-driven business culture. Convenient features like automated dataset integration, easy and intuitive expansion into new data sources, seamless integration with other applications, quick visualizations, and highly secure and easy to implement Row Level Security are some of the numerous reasons Power BI has become such a powerful and necessary tool.
In the era of data analytics and mining, Power BI is an excellent solution for businesses looking to utilize the data they gather intelligently to rapidly grow and adapt to changing consumer habits.