Introduction to Microsoft Power BI by BoyinaSoft

Microsoft introduced the idea of Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) back in 2009, Make Public Announcement Power Pivot for Microsoft Excel 2010. Unusually, at that time, it did not make big announcements, hold conferences or undertake a big marketing campaign for it. Everything started slowly, with some enthusiastic users adopting the new technology, but the vast majority of people did not even know about its existence. As part of the community of BI professionals, we were very surprised by that approach. At the time, we could clearly see the advantages for users to begin adopting Power Pivot as a tool for gathering insights from data, so this complete lack of marketing was somewhat disappointing.We wanted to write an introduction to Power BI that covers the basics of the tool and, at the same time shows you what the main capabilities of Power BI are. In the beginning, we go for an easy introduction of the concepts along with an educational approach that lets you follow on your PC the same steps. However, if we continued with that same mindset for the entire article, its size would quickly become intimidating. Thus, after the first chapters, we begin to run a bit faster, knowing that we are no longer guiding you step by step. Instead, we show you available features; if you want to learn the detailed Power BI Training in Bangalore by Boyina Soft.

There are information workers and people who are totally new to the BI world. For those readers, the article acts as a simple introduction to the concepts that are the foundation of BI. Yet, another category of we wanted to target is that of IT professionals and database administrators who might need to drive the decisions of the company in adopting Power BI, because their users are asking for it. If this is you, this article acts as both a simple introduction to the basic concepts, to help you understand why users are so interested in Power BI, and as an overview of the capabilities and tools available in Power BI, so that you can make educated choices in adopting it. Power BI is not just a tool: it is an ecosystem that can integrate existing corporate BI with Self-Service BI.

Power BI is an evolution of the add-ins previously available in Excel: Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power View. You can use Power BI with or without Excel—you no longer are dependent on the version of Microsoft Office installed at your company. People did not like to share reports by using the only SharePoint, and Microsoft moved away from it. Users wanted a mobile experience, and the development team created it. Data analysts wanted power, simplicity, new visualizations, and all of this is now available in Power BI. In addition, a lot of the effort went into the creation of a seamless experience in loading data from many different cloud sources and building the infrastructure needed to provide all BI enthusiasts with a framework with which they can grow their reports, share them with their teams, and refresh the data in a simple yet effective way.

Kumari is Content & Communications at Boyina Soft.