If you want to achieve higher efficiencies and improve business performance, then you will find Power BI Microsoft extremely beneficial. With Power BI Microsoft, build quality reports for better data understanding. By leveraging data analysis, you can gain insights—much needed to make informed decisions at the right time. Here is an easy guide you have created to help you get started.

Power BI Report Builder—What is it and Why Use it?

Power BI Report Builder by Microsoft is a powerful and highly-functional business intelligence toolset harnessing cloud technology. With this toolset, you can easily take big data sets from different sources and then integrate them into visually appealing and interactive reports and visuals. These visuals provide intelligent analytics insights that further assist with the data discovery and preparation process.

Apart from this, other reasons to use it are that Power BI report builder:

• Keeps your reports updated by automatically refreshing and publishing them
• Delivers users with the latest information
• Provides data analytics and business intelligence which helps users to prepare data, analyze, and build reports as well as dashboards within a single tool

Power BI Builder—Three Options to Choose From

Power BI Microsoft offers three main options for users to access data from. These are:

• Android or iOS mobile app
• Online Power BI service
• The Power BI desktop

However, the preferred option among most users for reporting and dashboard setup is the Power BI desktop. This is predominantly because the desktop version offers a variety of options for importing and transforming data such as:

The Report View

This feature of the desktop Power BI Builder offers users not one or two but 32 pre-built data analytics visualization tools. Plus, you also get a marketplace that is packed with third-party visualization add-ons.

All you have to do is:

• Choose a visualization of your choice in the visualization pane.
• Drag and drop the data into the newly created visuals from the fields pane
• Next, finalize the report’s overall visual appearance and publish it to the Power BI Service. This will allow your organization to access it online.

The Data View

This section gives users the power to view all the dataset tables to inspect data snapshots. Unlike the report view, you will be able to view data in the data view option once it is loaded into the model.

The Model View

On the other hand, the modeling feature empowers users to create relationships between multiple data tables. The user can do this by simply dragging the table field onto the associated field in the other table. For this, you don’t need a data engineer to build relationships between tables. Once you understand the dynamics of Power BI Builder, you can do it easily all by yourself.

Other features that Power BI Builders should know about and may find handy are:

Connectors

Storing data in different formats and from different sources can be difficult. However, the Power BI Builder feature connectors make things simple and easy. It provides you with a large selection of data sources that can easily and directly be connected to your reports. Some popular examples of databases that Power BI supports are MySQL, SQL, Access, Server, and PostgreSQL.

REST API

This feature provides you the power to manage large datasets and report them easily. For instance, if you use the same report in different workspaces, making changes to each report can be difficult and time-consuming. However, the REST API feature spares you from this time-consuming and frustrating task. With REST API, all you have to do is make changes to the single report. Once it is done, you can then easily push it in just one click to all your workspaces, thereby saving you time and energy.

Power Query

The power query feature allows users to shape as well as combine data into different formats. Users can choose from over 300 different data transformations. Moreover, you also have the flexibility to preview the transformations before applying them to the dataset. Some of the many ways to shape data are to:

• Rename columns
• Convert text into a number
• Create customized calculated columns

The Applied Steps Field enables you to view the various actions as soon as you apply them to the data. This further helps you decide which transformation to proceed with.

Moreover, the easy-to-follow and step-by-step actions provide a readable set of instructions when reviewing report queries.

Publish Report to Power BI Online

Once you are fully satisfied with visuals and data representation, you can publish the report to Power BI online. For this, all you have to do is click on the publish button. Moreover, the report can also be transformed into a dashboard. If you want to do this, access the report, click on the pin icon, and then select the dashboard you want your visual on (new or existing).

It is advisable to schedule an automated refresh. Otherwise, it will never refresh, and you will not have access to updated data or changes.

Stream Data in Real-Time

Another great feature worthy of mentioning is that it helps users stream data in real-time from social media sources, sensors, or any other source that can collect and transmit time-sensitive data. Furthermore, you can also create and get notified if a trigger is activated.

For more information on Power BI Microsoft or service assistance, contact us. We can help you navigate through the Power BI toolset and utilize it to your business advantage.