Whether it’s using interactive dashboards to consolidate key metrics or generating comprehensive reports to connect datasets from different workloads, Microsoft Power BI is a vital tool for leveraging business data from a wide range of diverse sources, enabling smarter, data-driven decisions. It offers rich visualizations all in one solution and, thanks to its self-service capabilities, is an intuitive tool for interacting with data.
Below, we list the arguments that may convince you why (and for what purposes) you should use Power BI as a strategic tool.
1. It's easy to link your data together
Power BI makes it incredibly easy to bring your data together in one place, providing greater accessibility, organization, and visibility in your reporting efforts.
The tool currently supports over 70 connectors out-of-the-box, enabling companies to load data from a wide range of commonly used cloud-based sources such as Azure (Azure Data Warehouse), DropBox, Google Analytics, and OneDrive, as well as Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, and on-premises data, such as SQL Database.
With these built-in connectors, you can load pre-built Power BI dashboards in seconds and perform powerful data analyses in minutes. And you can always further customize elements to your liking, or let your data specialists start from scratch by importing your datasets and developing your own dashboards and reports.
Power BI's drag-and-drop interface also means you don't have to write any code or copy and paste anything to get started. Power BI can combine multiple files (such as Excel spreadsheets) so you can analyze the combined data in a single report.
2. It is powerful and high-performance
Power BI's Power Pivot Data Modeling engine (which is shared with Excel) is a high-performance columnar database that uses modern technologies to compress databases and ensure they are loaded entirely into memory for optimal performance.
It is not uncommon for your Power BI workbook (.PBIX file) to be significantly smaller than your original datasets—in fact, 1 GB databases are typically compressed to a size of about 50–200 MB.
2. It is powerful and high-performance
Power BI's Power Pivot Data Modeling engine (which is shared with Excel) is a high-performance columnar database that uses modern technologies to compress databases and ensure they are loaded entirely into memory for optimal performance.
It is not uncommon for your Power BI workbook (.PBIX file) to be significantly smaller than your original datasets—in fact, 1 GB databases are typically compressed to a size of about 50–200 MB.
While—by comparison—Excel starts to slow down when handling large models, Power BI is optimized to process tables with more than 100 million records without any issues.
Power BI also implements automated, incremental refreshes, ensuring that data is always up to date. This, too, is a benefit for end users that should not be underestimated: visual reporting can be continuously streamlined. In short, Power BI efficiently compresses and loads millions of records into memory, providing end users with a faster and smoother data analysis experience.
3. It features customized, open-source visuals
Power BI comes with a wide variety of pre-built standard data visuals that you can use in your interactive reports, such as “bar, column, line, map, matrix, pie charts, scatter, table, and waterfall,” each with its own range of customization options for enhanced presentation and functionality.
For that extra touch, however, you can also use free, custom visuals created by developers (or in-house) and shared with the Power BI community. This allows you to display your own data in a way that best tells your story.
With custom visual assets available through both Microsoft and the community on the AppSource Marketplace, there is an impressive range of rich and complex visuals to choose from, including “bullet graphs, correlation plots, decision trees, heat maps, sparklines,” and more.
If you want to present your data in a very specific way, Power BI makes it very easy to create your own visuals instead of sticking with the standard ones. It’s also incredibly helpful to see what the broader Power BI community is using to improve your own design techniques.
4. Advanced data experts can take advantage of the native R integration
Power BI's strength lies in its simplicity, but it is also suitable for advanced data experts. One way it achieves this is through its support for R scripts, an open-source programming language that currently has more than 7,000 packages and is primarily used by data miners and statisticians.
R scripts use complex graphical techniques and statistical calculations for data manipulation, machine learning, and statistical modeling. This includes data visualization—and, of course, Power BI lets you integrate these detailed R visualizations directly into a standard dashboard.
Power BI is already great on its own for analyzing and segmenting data to better illustrate relationships, key metrics, and hierarchies, but with native support for R scripts, users can present more advanced business analytics and visualizations, such as machine learning, predictive trends, and smoothing.
5. Enable more advanced analyses using familiar Excel functions
Advanced Excel users with knowledge of the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) formula language can dig deeper into their data and identify patterns more easily in Power BI using familiar Power Pivot functions such as clustering, forecasting, grouping, and quick measures.
The built-in Power Query self-service tool will also be familiar to Excel users, making it easy from the start to import, transform, integrate, and enrich business data in Power BI.
Another underappreciated benefit is that Power BI integrates seamlessly with Excel, eliminating the need to export files; simply click ‘Analyze in Excel,’ and Power BI presents an interface that’s nearly identical to Excel. If you’re having trouble convincing business users to adopt a new tool, the native integration of Excel with Power BI can certainly help.
In summary: Power BI's powerful toolset is easy for Excel users to pick up, allowing you to leverage existing organizational expertise and get up to speed with Power BI more quickly.
6. It brings data management and security together
With Power BI, you can manage security and user access within the same interface, eliminating the need to use other tools to ensure that you meet strict compliance and regulatory standards.
The service also includes built-in Azure Active Directory (AAD) for user authentication, allowing you to use Single Sign-On (SSO) along with your regular Power BI credentials to access your data.
7. You can ask questions and get answers about your information
Power BI includes natural-language search interfaces that allow users to create visualizations and discover insights using search terms in plain English, without the need for code or syntax.
Using the Q&A feature, you can explore more specific insights by double-clicking on an empty area of your report canvas and using the ‘Ask a Question’ box to ask data-specific questions, such as ‘What were the sales for [region] by quarter?’.
As you type, Power BI automatically displays related, relevant queries and a preview of a chart or table visualization that best represents the data you're looking for. The Power BI mobile apps now also support voice recognition, making it possible to retrieve information on the go.
At first, it might all sound like a gimmick, but in reality, Power BI's natural language query engine is very intuitive and works exceptionally well. With constant updates from Microsoft, it can only get better and more accurate over time.
8. You can embed Power BI tiles in your custom PowerApps apps
Do you use PowerApps? If so, you can use the custom Power BI visual to embed your Power BI tiles in your app.
Thanks to Power BI's native integration with PowerApps, you can send contextual data to your PowerApps app that updates in real time as you make changes to your Power BI report. This allows your end users to access real-time data insights while using your custom-built applications within the same interface.
PowerApps is a powerful business tool used to create business apps that run on nearly all web browsers and operating systems—Android, iOS, and Windows—with a simplified interface that requires no coding experience.
With native integration between the services, this means it’s even easier to share key insights with employees using your custom internal apps, without needing access to Power BI itself. End users can also drill deeper into the data by simply clicking (or tapping, on mobile devices) the embedded Power BI tile to go to the dashboard, if it’s public.
9. Power BI is once again the market leader, according to Gartner and Forrester
Power BI has once again been included in the Gartner's 2020 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms and has been recognized year after year as one of the leading software solutions for data analysis, alongside popular competitors such as Qlik and Tableau. See also Forrester's "Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Power BI".
10. We integrate Power BI directly with Dynamics NAV or Business Central
Modern Business Intelligence is about making data accessible and manageable for the average user. There are many solutions on the market that can address this need, but the challenge is often that implementation and setup are both costly and time-consuming.
That's why Alistar has developed Power BI Extensions, which provide you with all the BI functionality you need without having to worry about complex, resource-intensive implementations or difficult development. With our solution, you get all the BI functionality you need.
If you'd like to learn more about Power BI Extensions and the many benefits this solution offers your business, please feel free to contact us!
With these 10 reasons, it’s not hard to see why Power BI is becoming increasingly popular among companies looking for better insights, interactive dashboards, and comprehensive reporting.
What's more, now is the perfect time to take advantage of the many tools and services available to help you prepare for a successful Power BI rollout and improve your data insights across the entire organization.
