From the course: Power BI Essential Training

Overview: Power BI concepts - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Overview: Power BI concepts

“

- [Presenter] Business intelligence is about connecting business decision making to facts about the business and about its environment, to take a deep dive and understand the data underneath your business and its processes. We start by getting data from one or more sources. If we have multiple sources of data that we're tying together, we need to build a model that describes the relationships between the data sources. Using our model of the data, we will create visualizations, charts, tables, and so on that we can share with our colleagues. And with all of this information summarize and illustrated in a way that is accessible and useful, our team or our department or organization will be able to make better business decisions. Until recently, business intelligence meant big business, what was called Enterprise BI, and the players were big players, SAP and Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and so on, large companies creating really large tools. And Enterprise BI was the realm of the IT professional more than any other group. That meant that IT folks and IT resources were required to analyze what was needed in the business so that IT could retrieve exactly the correct data to create the reports that end users and business managers were requesting. The first solid alternative to this type of enterprise business intelligence was Microsoft Excel because Excel allowed users to analyze data for themselves, even if they had to get the data from IT, even if they had to use last month's downloaded data. Excel is a popular business tool precisely because so many people learned Excel to be able to get a better handle on their business, on the data for their products, their departments, their companies. For many of us, Excel was our first step into self-serve business intelligence. The current version of Power BI was built almost totally in Excel and with add-ins for Excel. Microsoft, however, has continued to evolve Power BI and it now has a set of tools that are not Excel-centric. Before we begin then, let's have some core understanding of what it is we do with Power BI. First, we will create datasets, the models I referred to a moment ago, which could be data all from one source or from multiple sources. We will use those data sets to create reports. And don't simply think of rows and rows of figures with labels. Reports in Power BI are vibrant with funnel charts, tree maps, geospatial maps, dozens of types of visualizations. These reports aren't necessarily meant to be shared directly. If we want to share the information in our reports, we'll take parts of the reports, some of the visualizations, and create dashboards, and this is very easy to do. Power BI is not just one product. We have a number of tools and we will focus on a few of them in this course. First, the Power BI service, also called powerbi.com, or what most people mean when they say Power BI. It's web-based, and for many users, this is the only tool they use because the Power BI service allows users to manipulate visualizations to do a deeper analysis of business information. If you are an end user, you may spend almost your entire time in Power BI in the Power BI service, but if you are a business analyst or a power user, then you will probably also use Power BI Desktop, a free download that sits on your Windows computer and allows you to do the things that we previously did only in Excel to model our data, to transform our data, and also we can create reports here that we publish to the Power BI service. Additionally, there are mobile apps for Power BI for iOS and Android. There are some other components in the Power BI ecosystem that we will not focus on at all in this course, including a visuals marketplace where you can download custom visuals, a Power BI gateway used to synchronize data coming into Power BI from enterprise systems on-premises. Power BI Report Server is used in the place of Power BI service for companies that don't have their data stored in the cloud. Finally, there is a growing set of developer tools for Power BI. You may recall that there are three major licenses for Power BI: Power BI, which is free, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium. Regardless of the license that we use, we're going to use the tools in Power BI in what will become a familiar pattern. We're going to get data using either the Power BI service or Power BI Desktop. And if we need to build data models, we will do that exclusively in Power BI Desktop. We'll create visualizations and use them to create reports and dashboards, and then we will share them with our teams using either the Power BI service or Power BI mobile apps.

Contents