Power BI Features – Get Instant Insights To Business Metrics

Business Intelligence (BI) is crucial to any enterprise who wants to get detailed insights into their businesses activities and performance. Several enterprises are using business intelligence (BI) systems to gather and track information specific to customer behavior, sales, and revenue in order to make informed business decisions. One such tool that every Microsoft software development company must leverage is Power BI.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a self-service business analytics tool developed by Microsoft. It is a free, data analytics cloud service that provides interactive visualizations for enterprises to create dashboards and reports without having to rely on any database administration. Power BI has an intuitive user interface which integrates deeply with other Microsoft products such as Cortana.

To help you get started, Power BI offers some important features that help in determining business trends and enhance decision-making process. Let’s take a look at the Power BI features mentioned below.

Power BI Desktop:

This feature lets you create some interactive dashboards and reports with ease. You can easily access the data and create your own report through a simple yet powerful interface, Power BI Desktop. It is free to download and an ideal tool if you want to emphasize on visualizations and share data on the web. Power BI Desktop regularly releases several updates, features, and enhancements and constantly evolves its platform to help you get quick data insights for your business.

Custom Visualizations:

When it comes to displaying your reports, Power BI offers a wide variety of visualizations. Some of its popular visualizations include Line, Pie, and Bar charts. But if you want to customize your visualizations, you can either use Power BI’s ever-growing library of custom visualizations or ask your Microsoft developer to extend the current set of Power BI visuals with their own creations. This way you can display your business data the way you visualize. You can access the Power BI Custom Visuals Gallery site to get started.

Hybrid Deployment Support:

Getting data out of your enterprise applications or other external systems requires some technical expertise. But Power BI provides prebuilt connectors which allow you to connect to ‘content packs’ or a number of different SaaS applications like Microsoft, Salesforce, and other non-Microsoft vendors. You can use preconfigured dashboards to present data that can be modified to fit your requirements. All you need to do is, enter the URL and provide credentials of your online service. The preconfigured dashboards will be set up automatically. Developers can even create their own content packs to include many other SaaS applications and offer them in the Azure store. Also, Power BI keeps updating new services to new content packs while helping you deliver dashboards within minutes.

Cortana Integration:

Ever imagined asking questions to your computer in natural language and getting them answered? With Windows 10 operating system and Cortana (Microsoft’s digital assistant), you can verbally ask questions to Cortana specific to your data in Power BI. You need to configure your dataset in Power BI to allow Cortana to access the data and provide you with the custom insights you require.

With the powerful features and integration that Power BI has to offer, the future of business intelligence looks promising. Power BI will introduce more enhanced features and updates, especially in combination with IoT devices, to help enterprises get a holistic view of their business metrics.

If you have any thoughts, questions or suggestions on Microsoft Power Bi, please share with us through the comments.

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