Power BI Tutorial — A Complete Guide on Introduction to Power BI

Welcome to the ‘Microsoft Power BI: Quick Start Guide’ by Susheel Aakulu. Before we begin this journey of learning a new BI technology called Microsoft Power BI, we must understand some basics about it. This introductory tutorial of Microsoft Power BI will give you some interesting information and insights on this BI technology. Therefore, I request you to take some time out and explore this thoroughly as it will act as a building block for learning Power BI technology.

We can confidently presume that not many of you are aware of business intelligence and data visualization, especially in today’s world, where data is the Robin of every business and organization. And, without this Robin, there is no Batman! Data is a treasure of knowledge and valuable information used by the ones helping a business to make lucrative and effective decisions at the right time.

“BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can take the right decisions”

Power BI Tutorial

Before diving into the Power BI introduction, let’s have a quick look at what Business intelligence (BI) means?. BI refers to taking raw data from a data source, transforming it into usable data and utilizing it to make reports and informative graphics for data analysis.

Graphically representing tabular data is known as data visualization. It enables a user to visualize important information through charts, graphs, KPIs, maps, etc., to attain valuable insights just by looking at them. Well, Microsoft Power BI is a tool having business intelligence and data visualization capabilities.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a cloud-based business analysis and intelligence service by Microsoft. It is a collection of business intelligence and data visualization tools such as software services, apps and data connectors.

We can use the datasets imported in Power BI for data visualization and analysis by making sharable reports, dashboards, and apps. In addition, Power BI is a user-friendly tool offering impressive drag-and-drop features and self-service capabilities.

Microsoft offers three types of Power BI platforms:

• Power BI Desktop (A desktop application)
• Power BI Service (SaaS i.e., Software as a Service)
• Power BI Mobile (For iOS and Android devices)

Also, we can deploy Power BI on both on-premise and on-cloud platforms.

In the image given below, have a look at the process flow in Power BI.

Why Power BI?

As we learnt in the previous section of Power BI tutorial that, Power BI is an umbrella term with several different services under its tutelage..

1. There is a cloud-based BI service called Power BI Services used to view and share dashboards.
2. A desktop-based reporting interface known as Power BI Desktop.
3. Another helpful service is the Power BI Embedded feature that runs on an Azure cloud platform, and we can use it for report creation, ETL and data analysis.

Further, let us discuss a few points regarding why Power BI is an important tool in today’s time and why do we need it.

• Real-time analysis of data in Power BI can be achieved by establishing direct connections to the data sources. Also, it keeps data updated to the latest second by data refresh set-up.
• You can use custom visualizations from a custom visual’s gallery. Custom visuals are broken down into various options and categories for report building.
• You can quickly search for meaningful insights and datasets within your data by using the Quick Insights option.
• Establish a live or non-live connection to on-premises data sources like SQL Server. Use a secure channel to access data through data gateways. This feature makes Power BI enterprise-ready as on-premises links make data transfer safe and the technology scalable and reliable.
• You can connect to other services through Power BI, such as SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), Microsoft Excel, and many more.
• Power BI is a new age software using the latest technologies such as HTML 5.0, column store databases, cloud computing, mobile apps, and much more. These updated tech helps keep Power BI on the top and popular. In addition, it is constantly getting updated with more and more new additional features.

History of Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft’s product initially released on 11th July 2011. It was originally designed and created by Ron George in 2010, who released it with the name “Project Crescent”. Later in September of 2013, Microsoft changed the name to Power BI and launched it for the public.

This release was a Power BI for Office 365 and had Microsoft Excel add-ins, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query in it. In later versions, Microsoft added advanced features like natural language Q&A, enterprise-level data security and connectivity, Power data gateways, etc.

Power BI’s first general public release was on July 24th, 2015. As of 2019, Power BI has been officially declared as one of the leading BI tools by 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform.

Power BI Features

These are some of the most important and interesting features of Power BI:

• Visualizations/ custom visualizations
• GetData (Data sources)/data connections
• Datasets
• Dashboards
• Filters
• Ad hoc analysis
• Reports/ ad hoc reporting
• Trend indicators
• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• Navigation pane
• Natural language Q & A box
• DAX functions and formula
• Office 365 app launcher
• Content packs
• Authoring interactive reports

Power BI Components

Power BI is a business intelligence and data mining software suite which is a collection of different kinds of services by Microsoft. These services play a specific role and work in coordination to make Power BI function as a whole. This section of Power BI tutorial will learn about these Power BI services or components and their roles.

• Power Query: We use this service to access, search and transform data from public or local/internal data sources.
• Power Pivot: This service provides tools to model data taken from the in-memory data source to use it for analytics.
• Power View: This service has many tools to graphically represent data using visuals and use them for analysis.
• Power Map: It comes with tools and capabilities to visualize Geo-spatial data or information in the 3D model in a map. You can use these maps in a Power BI report.
• Power BI Desktop: It is a companion development tool for Power View, Power Query, and Power Pivot. You can import data from a data source, prepare and transform it and use it in visualizations to create reports in Power BI Desktop.
• Power BI Website: It is a web platform to view and share Power BI apps or solutions. Using Power BI Website, you can create dashboards from reports, share the dashboards with other Power BI users and slice and dice data within a report.
• Power Service: The Power Service enables the sharing of workbooks and data views with other users. The data gets refreshed at regular intervals from the on-premises or/and cloud-based data sources.
• Power Q&A: Using the Power Q&A option, you can search for your data or discover insights by entering queries in natural language. It instantly understands your query and returns relevant results.
• Power BI Mobile apps: Business users view and interact with the reports and dashboards published on a cloud service through mobile hosted Power BI instances. Android, Windows and iOS mobile devices support the Power BI mobile apps.
• Data Catalog: The Data Catalog option offers the capability to search and reuse queries.
• Data Management Gateway: This component manages the periodic data refreshes, data feed viewing and table exposing.

Power BI Architecture

To have a better understanding of Power BI, we can divide the architecture into three parts or phases:

1. Data Integration

In Power BI, we can import data from different data sources in various formats. Power BI brings data together (extracted) from multiple data sources and converts it into a standard format in the data integration step. After the information is integrated into Power BI, it is stored in a shared storage area known as the staging area.

2. Data Processing

Once Power BI integrates and stores data at a secure place, the raw data requires some processing. Several processing or cleansing operations transform the raw data, such as removing redundant values, dropping unnecessary columns, transforming data etc. Later, we apply relevant business rules to the processed data that change according to our business needs. Finally, this transformed data is loaded into the data warehouses — all these steps combined complete a whole ETL process.

3. Data Presentation

In this final phase, the processed data moves from the warehouse and goes into the Power BI platforms like Power BI Desktop to create reports, dashboards, and scorecards. Power BI offers a wide range of visualizations. We can also import custom visualization from the marketplace. Finally, we can publish the reports on the web or mobile apps from the report development platforms to share them with other business users.

Users of Power BI

Power BI users are categorized into four sections according to the purpose of the usage of Power BI. These four types of users are Analysts, Business users, IT professionals and Developers. Let’s learn some more about them.

1. Analysts

Analysts use Power BI to develop reports, dashboards, data models and to discover valuable insights into the data. Power BI offers a wide range of data sources from which an analyst can extract data, make a common dataset, cleanse and prepare that data to create reports and conduct analysis.

2. Business Users

The business users are the everyday users who study the reports and dashboards available to share with them on the Power BI website or mobile app. Business users remain updated with the latest information, which helps in taking important decisions in time. They can also set an alert notification for any change or abnormality in data (if it occurs).

3. IT professionals

The IT professionals are mainly concerned with the scalability, availability, and security of data. They also centrally manage all the Power BI services and users.

4. Developers

Developers are responsible for all the technical work. Their key roles are to create custom visuals in Power BI, embed Power BI into other applications, create reports, etc.

Data Connections in Power BI

There are a plethora of data sources from which you can extract data into Power BI. For example, you can connect to data files on your local system, Excel files, Azure SQL Database, Facebook, Google Analytics, Power BI datasets, etc.

In addition, you can connect to cloud-based sources, on-premises data sources using gateways, online services, direct connections, etc. We have listed some commonly used data sources below.

• File: Excel, Text/CSV, XML, PDF, JSON, Folder, SharePoint.
• Database: SQL Server database, Access database, Oracle database, SAP HANA database, IBM, MySQL, Teradata, Impala, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, etc.
• Power BI: Power BI datasets and Power BI dataflows.
• Azure: Azure SQL, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Data Lake, Azure Cosmos DB, etc.
• Online Services: Salesforce, Azure DevOps, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Dynamics 365, Facebook, GitHub, etc.
• Others: Python script, R script, Web, Spark, Hadoop File (HDFS), ODBC, OLE DB, Active Directory, etc.

Power BI Pricing

Now, I am sure you must have started liking Power BI after learning what it has to offer. And so, you would also want to know its pricing and licensing costs. I will let you know about the prices of different versions with their features in this Power BI Introduction. Microsoft has put out three pricing plans for Power BI:

• The basic version, Power BI Desktop, is free of cost and includes tools for data visualization, data preparation, data modelling, data cleansing and publishing reports to Power BI Service.
• Power BI Pro is available at a subscription price of $9.99 per user per month. In addition, you can try 60 days free trial before purchasing the subscription. This plan for Power BI Pro includes tools for data collaboration, a 360 real-time view for dashboards, data governance, and the freedom to publish reports anywhere.
• The Power BI Premium is available for $4,995 per month for one dedicated storage resource and cloud computing facility

Companies using Power BI

Power BI is a relatively new business analytics software in the market and is gaining popularity very fast. It has gathered a vast customer base worldwide already and is rapidly expanding. Here is a list of a few big names that use Power BI as their business analysis software:

• DELL
• Capgemini
• Nuevora
• Accenture
• Agile BI
• Data Bear

Power BI Case Study on Rolls-Royce

In this section, we will briefly walk through a case study of Power BI. This will help us understand the role of Power BI in a real-life scenario. The case in the spotlight here is Rolls-Royce. This 20-year-old company needs no introduction. This year, it is making more than 13,000 engines for commercial aircraft used around the world. This speaks for its massive and ever-increasing customer base. Now let us move further and see the company’s challenges and how Power BI proved to be helpful.

The problem

The most fundamental challenge of the company was to optimize maintenance costs, operational costs, fuel expenses, etc. This is only possible when the company can record, access, and analyze the data produced by all the systems and equipment of the aircraft. With the advancing technology, the systems can record more and more signals which are the data from different aircraft sensors. This has resulted in a constant increase in data volumes. So, the company needed a good data management and analysis system that filter necessary signals or data and use them to generate insights.

In addition to this, Rolls-Royce launched a customer service and maintenance model known as “Total Care Services”. It was a very successful initiative that involved engine maintenance services for the customer. For this, the company also needed proper insights into data to establish a bond with their customers.

The change

Rolls-Royce chose the Microsoft Azure platform and Power BI to manage and analyze terabytes of data coming from the engines and maintenance systems. With the help of Microsoft Azure, the company was able to aggregate data from varied locations and sources. And with the help of Microsoft Power BI, they were able to carry out analysis on the extracted data.

With Power BI, they designed and created dashboards and reports having informative visuals and charts. Earlier, creating informative reports to gain insights into data was time-consuming. But with Power BI, it is the easiest step in the entire process. Thus, Power BI plays a crucial role in providing valuable insights into data to focus on improving operational efficiencies and establishing long-lasting relationships with its customers.

Summary

This brings our introductory tutorial on Microsoft Power BI to an end. I hope it helped you lay a solid foundation about the technology. In the tutorials to come, I will expand on more interesting topics and tools of Power BI.