Beginning Power BI for Business Users

1Introducing Power BI

In the “old days,” the kinds and sources of data available to us in the workplace were limited. Making data-driven decisions was a process of gathering enough reports, synthesizing that data into spreadsheets, and pivoting that data into various ways of slicing and dicing until you reached some level of clarity to proceed with a decision. Some folks were lucky enough to have data warehousing tools to assist them with that process, but more often than not, even they had to wrangle that data from the warehouse and pull it all together into multiple tables and charts side-by-side to try to make heads or tails of what was seen. And if someone had the audacity to ask, “What would happen if I changed this one variable?” or “How does this data category impact this other category?” then you'd be spending another week reloading, rearranging, and reformatting the results.

But things have changed dramatically even in the last decade. The simultaneous growth of processing power and data availability has been accompanied by applications that are designed to leverage that explosive growth. Data analysis tools now easily enable exploration of large volumes of data and provide a dynamic experience where one can quickly visualize, “What would happen if I change that one variable?” or “How does this data category impact this other category?” Enter Power BI: Microsoft's game-changing data analysis service.

NOTE All those efforts, tools, and infrastructure to gather data ...