What is Power BI?

Every Excel user who spends their days re-organising data must learn about Power Query (now called Get & Transform in Excel 2016). It is so good that not knowing it will soon be career limiting.

Power Query (as I'll continue to call it for now) is the "gateway drug" to Power Pivot and PowerBI.com.

This article is for newcomers to PowerBI, to shed some light on what this suite of tools is capable of.

I have been talking about Power BI a lot, and can only forsee that I will be talking about it even more in the future so I'm going to do my best to summarise what all the "fuss" is about.

Let's start with the BI part, what is BI?

Business Intelligence. I'm yet to see anyone clearly expressing what this means. It's such a "catch all" term that most people, including those investing in Business Intelligence systems, wouldn't be able to give you a clear definition.

Take the Wikipedia definition for example:

"a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes"

To those of us involved in developing these tools, that is a fair summary, but to everyone else it's still a bit confusing.

BI is UI

Change the phrase Business Intelligence for Useful Information and it's a lot clearer.

It's all about Useful Information

What makes Information Useful?

Information is only useful if it helps with a decision - end of story.

Raw data, lots of numbers and figures in a disorganised mess, is not useful.

Late information is not useful, or at least not as useful if it had been on time.

Poorly presented / structured information is less useful as insights can be missed or time wasted interpreting the results

Irrelevant information is not useful. I've seen too many Board Packs and management reports that contain information relating to the "hot topic" of 12 months ago, but the information is still getting churned out. A rapidly changing environment requires flexible information

Materially Incorrect information is not useful. I'm careful to use the phrase "materially" incorrect information, since sometimes getting it 95% right and on time is better than 100% perfect but 2 weeks late. That said there is this important point....

The seeds of doubt that get sewn when even simple rounding errors are identified can grow into a field of distrust in the entire report

How do we get Useful Information?

Excel

Excel is the greatest Business Intelligence tool ever invented, and will always continue to be. Just take a look back at that Wikipedia definition.

You get data from various sources, re-organise it, present it to people so that they can make informed decisions.

At it's core, my job over the last 20 years has been to make this process as simple and efficient as possible. Building these information creation tools or training people how to improve the way they do it themselves.

So what is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a suite of 4 utilities that dramatically improve the ability for numbers people like myself to provide useful information more easily.

When I say "dramatically improve" I really can't overstate how incredible these utilities are.

• Power Query (Built into Excel and Power BI Desktop)
• Power Pivot (Built into Excel and Power BI Desktop)
• Power BI Desktop(A standalone development tool incorporating Power Query and Power Pivot with a fantastic charts and visualisations layer)
• PowerBI.com (A cloud based platform for hosting and sharing dashboards)

The above elements include links to our website for more detail on each of these utilities but here's my very brief "plain speaking" summary on what they are.

Power Query

Power Query is the worlds’ greatest washing machine! Get all of your “dirty” data from any location, clean it up via a user friendly interface and then load it all neat and folded to a destination of your choice (Excel or Power Pivot)

Power Pivot

So if Power Query is a washing machine, Power Pivot is the worlds’ greatest data wardrobe!

• You simply load your clean data into Power Pivot and then connect the relevant pieces together using drag and drop.
• Reporting is then a breeze as you can access all the tables of data in Power Pivot and use drag and drop to create your report.
• Finally you can add filter buttons to present different cuts or slices of your information.

Power BI Desktop

Quite simply it’s an amazing FREE dedicated dashboard development tool incorporating Power Query and Power Pivot.

Power BI desktop is your dashboard development tool. With it you can create interactive charts and then publish them to PowerBI.com. This then provides users with the ability to interact with the reports from any device and gain insight from their information.

Power BI Desktop is an elegant end-to-end solution for building analytics. The Desktop has all the capabilities to quickly connect, shape, visualise, and share data insights through Power BI.com

PowerBI.com

Publish your reports from Excel or Power BI Desktop into the cloud so that others can view and interact with the information from any device.

Summary

Microsoft Power BI is enhancing what Excel has been great at for the last 20 years and is taking it to a whole new level.

Useful Information is now easier to create and distribute and that's a great development.

This is what I spend my days working on. Developing tools and providing training in Excel and Power BI in order to provide Useful Information to organisations.

I've really only scratched the surface of what's possible, to find out more please take a look at the web pages I've created.

Wyn

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