What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a data visualization platform used primarily for business intelligence purposes. Designed to be used by business professionals with varying levels of data knowledge, Power BI’s dashboard is capable of reporting and visualizing data in a wide range of different styles, including graphs, maps, charts, scatter plots, and more.?Power BI's "AI Insights" functionality, meanwhile, uses artificial intelligence to find insights within data sets for users.

Power BI itself is composed of several interrelated applications: Power BI Desktop, Pro, Premium, Mobile, Embedded, and Report Server. While some of these applications are free-to-use, paid subscriptions to the pro and premium versions provide greater analytics capabilities.?

Power BI is also a part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. Created as “low-code tools,” these applications help businesses analyze and visualize data, design business solutions, automate processes, and create no-code chatbots.?

What is Power BI used for?

Whether you’re a data pro or are just entering the business world,? Power BI is designed to empower you with data-driven insights. Some of the most common uses for the platform include:?

• Creating reports and dashboards that present data sets in multiple ways using visuals?
• Connecting various data sources, such as Excel sheets, onsite data warehouses, and cloud-based data storage, and then transforming them into business insights??
• Turning data into a wide range of different visuals, including pie charts, decomposition trees, gauge charts, KPIs, combo charts, bar and column charts, and ribbon charts – among many other options?
• Providing company-wide access to data, data visualization tools, and insights in order to create a data-driven work culture