Introduction

Power BI is a Microsoft business intelligence tool. So firstly, let us understand what Business Intelligence is.

Business Intelligence is a set of processes and techniques to analyze raw data and extract information that helps make business decisions. It allows you to keep track of business data and draw valuable insights.

Power BI includes both desktop and web-based applications for loading, modeling, and visualizing data to generate coherent and interactive insights. It is basically an interactive reporting platform for business analytics and data analytics.

What is Power BI

Power BI is a business analysis tool provided by Microsoft to use different data sources and helps you visualize that data and share your insights. It is used to create interactive dashboards and BI reports in order to help and understand the business situation better so that .

• Business Intelligence Tool
• Reports And Dashboards
• Cleaning Data
• Modelling Data
• Visualizing Data
• Sharing Data

Power BI Architecture

There are two major components of Power BI

1. Power BI Desktop – Used by Developers to Create Charts and Reports. Under Power BI Desktop, there are three following main components.

• Power Query: Data Cleaning It allows you to connect different data sources and combine the data sets, which can be further refined in order to meet the analysis goals.
• Power Pivot: Data Modelling It allows you to generate findings from the given data set by establishing relationships and creating calculations. Data Analysis Expression (DAX) language is used to model both simple and complex data.
• Power View: Data Visualization It allows you to create charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals which are very interactive and so helps in bringing your data to life.

1. Power BI Service – To Publish Reports Online.

Why do we need Power BI

To Create Interactive Dashboards: Power BI dashboard is a single page visualization to tell a story. The visualizations in the dashboard are generated from reports, and each report is based on one dataset.

To make better business decisions: Once the stakeholders have a better understanding about the business performance based on the factual data, it becomes easier to plan a course of action.

Complete automation of manual tasks: With Power BI, we can clean, model, visualize and even share the results all under the same framework.

Handles a wide variety of data types: Power BI provides usage of almost all types of data sources like excel, CSV, pdf, SQL, oracle, and even websites.

Machine Learning: Due to the advanced analytics of Power BI and being a very good data visualization tool, it has become a core part in Data Science and Machine Learning.

Interactive UI/UX features: Power BI provides a visually appealing drag and drop functionality which makes it a very user-friendly interaction.

Accelerate Big Data preparation with Azure: Power BI complimented with azure allows you to analyse and share huge volumes of data and reduce the time to get insights, and increase collaboration between business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.

How to get started with Power BI

The first thing you need to do to get started is to install the Power BI Desktop application on to your system. This will help you get hands-on experience with the tool and you can use a given data set to help you get familiar with the several options that Power BI offers.

Power BI Desktop Installation

Power BI Desktop is the authoring tool of Power BI and you can download it for zero cost. In this application you can create your reports and dashboards. But in order to publish your reports online, you need to buy the Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium subscription as then only you get access to the Power BI Service feature.

Here’s where you can get Power BI Desktop application

• Directly from Microsoft Store

Or you can download an executable file from the link provided https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=58494Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.

Once you have downloaded the Application file as per your OS. Run the file and you will get a license agreement screen; you can accept it and follow the instructions on the screen to complete the installation. And you are good to go.

YouTube Channel Recommendations:

• Guy in a Cube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GuyinaCube
• Microsoft Power BI: https://www.youtube.com/user/mspowerbi

These channels will help you start with your learning journey in Power BI.

Power BI Career Opportunities

The demand for Power BI professionals is growing at a very fast rate. There are numerous opportunities as many of the companies worldwide are hiring Power BI professionals for various roles and in different industries. The average salary being offered is around 6 lacs per annum for different job profiles In India.

Salary Packages:

• Up to 6 lacs (Entry Level)
• 6 to 15 lacs (Intermediate Level)
• 15 to 50 lacs (Senior Level)

Some of the In-demand roles are:

• Power BI Analyst
• Power BI Software Engineer
• Power BI Business Analyst (IT)
• Senior Business Intelligence (BI) analyst

Top Companies Using Power BI Worldwide

• Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC
• Kraft Heinz Co
• Dell
• HCL Technologies
• Accenture
• Ernst & Young
• Capgemini
• Deloitte

Future of Power BI

Power BI is already emerging as a leader among the BI tools. It is one of the most in-demand and advanced Business Intelligence tools that are present in the market currently along with Tableau. According to Slintel Microsoft Power BI holds around 9.94% market share and has around 39,743 customers as of 2021.

As shown through the above graph Microsoft is positioned highest in the leaders quadrant in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. This shows the demand and acceptance that Power BI has been able to achieve. And this trend will only move upwards from here.

So, its right to say that Power BI is the future of Business Intelligence.