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The platform operates as a suite

Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 8:16 am
by nurnobi40
In this article, you will better understand what Power BI is, Microsoft's Business Intelligence (BI) software . The tool is widely used in the business area for data analysis and visualization, in addition to being a very popular ally of BI professionals.

Microsoft software offers several features, functionalities and components that help analyze data and extract valuable insights for a company's decision-making .

Follow along and learn all about Microsoft's Power BI and how this tool can help boost your business's data-driven strategies !

What is Power BI and what is it for?

Source: Microsoft

Power BI is a Business Intelligence (BI) tool developed by Microsoft, which aims to gather large amounts of data from various sources and organize them into visually pleasing, intuitive, interactive and easy-to-understand reports.

It is already known that data-driven culture , that is, companies that guide their business strategies on real data, has become increasingly relevant for organizations.

To help implement this type of initiative in a business, BI processes are essential and are already part of the operations of many companies.

Currently, there are many Business Intelligence tools on the market, one of them is Microsoft Power BI.

of software services with multiple components that integrate to organize data sources and transform them into reports and graphs with useful and visually appealing information.

Microsoft Power BI is used by data professionals, such as an why do vietnamese people use zalo alysts or data scientists , who can simplify large amounts of data, extracting valuable insights that will help a company's decision-making.

Thus, Power BI helps not only in the data analysis process, but also in business decisions.

History of Power BI
The history of Power BI is directly related to another widely used Microsoft tool, Excel. Microsoft Excel has always been used to gather data and analyze it in a structured and efficient way.

However, changes have occurred over the years, causing Microsoft to understand that Excel's capabilities were limited when it came to data analysis, business analysis and Business Intelligence .

To solve this demand, Microsoft developed other features such as Power Pivot and Power View , which were Excel integrations, focused on analyzing large amounts of data and generating interactive reports and graphs.

Thus, the creation of Power BI was the result of the gradual evolution of several Microsoft tools , which generated a complete solution for these needs.

Today, software, or rather, the set of software and applications, offers:

A desktop version with several solutions involving data analysis, such as data cleaning, modeling and visualization;
A cloud service ( SaaS );
A mobile application for Windows, iOS and Android devices.
Power BI was officially launched in 2015. Today, the tool is one of the most used in the area of ​​Business Intelligence and Data Analytics and continues to be a complete solution for data-driven businesses.

Who uses Microsoft's BI tool?
Power BI is an easy-to-use tool that aims to simplify and make the process of analyzing and visualizing data intuitive and interactive .

Therefore, this BI platform can be used by any team, professional or individual who wants to generate, consume or collaborate on data reports and dashboards in a simplified and valuable way.

Some of the most common user profiles that use it are data analysts and scientists, BI analysts, stakeholders (parties interested in consuming the generated content, such as managers and administrators), etc.

However, several sectors within a company can benefit from the tool to obtain useful information that helps their segments.

This way, any company or team that needs to create intuitive and informative data reports and use them to make business decisions can take advantage of the advantages and features of Power BI.

Advantages of Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a very popular tool for both data analysis and business.

The software offers many features and resources that optimize the process of connecting and processing data, to make it more understandable and help with business decisions.

Therefore, some reasons that make this an interesting choice for companies are:

Uncomplicated and quite intuitive, facilitating use by different user profiles;
Competitive prices and very affordable compared to other options on the market;
Robust integrations with many other software, SaaS and tools (including those from Microsoft);
Connection to various banks and data sources;
SaaS cloud tool (Power BI Service);
Provides data modeling capabilities;
It is friendly for use on mobile devices;
Adaptable to different company profiles (small, medium or large);
Very intuitive, customizable and interactive data visualization;
Sharing and collaboration with other users available in the tool, etc.
Components of Microsoft BI Software
The Microsoft tool is made up of some software services and applications that integrate and are important for using the platform.

The main components of Power BI are:

Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is the Microsoft application that you can install on your Windows computer (MacOS or Linux are not supported) to start using Power BI.

It is in this application that the entire process of connection, cleaning and transformation, modeling and data visualization takes place .

Additionally, from it, it is possible to create visuals, reports and dashboards and share this information in other components of the platform.

So, Power BI Desktop provides various features like;

Connection of data originating from different sources;
Creation of data models, defining hierarchies and relationships between different databases;
Data cleaning and transformation ;
Data visualization through interactive and intuitive graphic panels;
Data reporting ;
Sharing information, etc.
Power BI Service (Cloud Service)
Power BI Service is the platform's cloud service. SaaS is typically used as the next step after creating reports and dashboards in the desktop version.

This means that professionals using the Power BI Service can share reports and dashboards created with the desktop version, consume that content, and collaborate with stakeholders on the discoveries and insights generated.

Although this is its main use, it is also possible to use Microsoft's BI SaaS to create reports and dashboards , just like in Power BI Desktop.

Additionally, a very popular feature of the service is Q&A – an instant natural language question and answer feature that allows users to ask questions about the available reports and get clear answers to their queries.