If you want to scale your business and make the most of data, Power BI is one of the best business intelligence tools you can bank upon. Why?
Well, unlike other Business Intelligence tools, Microsoft’s Power BI has a better GUI, which is easier to understand and requires no coding at all. Just drag and drop some features, and you can create interactive Power BI dashboards within minutes. Also, Power BI is quite affordable, which makes it ideal for small businesses and startups with limited resources.
Want to know more about such Power BI advantages that make Power BI a reliable BI tool? Read along. This blog talks about the top advantages of the Power BI dashboard along with its use cases in different business domains.
Power BI Dashboard offers numerous benefits and advantages that make visualizing complex data easy. Here are some of them:
Power BI offers you a pretty user-friendly interface that makes the entire dashboard creation process easy. So much so that you do not even need to write a single line of code to create them. Just drag and drop the features, and you’re good to go.
What’s more, there’s an in-built intelligence in this tool that recommends the right reporting element based on your choices.
For instance, after choosing the data source if you opt for sales and location, Power BI will automatically identify the map chart. That’s how smart it is.
As stated earlier, the Power BI dashboard requires no coding; it’s easy to use and master. Also, Power BI was developed on the foundation of Microsoft Excel, which further lowers the learning curve when it comes to creating Power BI dashboards. If you know EXCEL, you’ll face no issues using the Power BI dashboard.
P.S. Power BI offers learning guides if you want better information on how to use it.
Power BI offers amazing customization when it comes to creating and sharing dashboards. You can create Power BI HR Analytics Dashboard to simplify the HR process, a Power BI for Banking Dashboard for analyzing finances, or Power BI Marketing Dashboard to determine the success of your campaigns.
So, regardless of the business domain, you belong to, you can easily customize the Power BI dashboard as you like. What’s more, you can even integrate the Power BI dashboard into your website or application to offer a better and more unified user experience.
Business Intelligence tools help analyze huge amounts of data that come from various data sources. However, most BI tools are limited when it comes to data sources. That means they accept a set number of data sources to pull the data from, which can be a problem.
Fortunately, Power BI solves this problem. When you’re creating Power BI dashboards, you can pull data from almost any data source, such as:
The above list of data sources is just an example of how extensive Power BI is when it comes to pulling data from data sources. In its true sense, there are even more data sources that you can choose from.
Power BI is quite an affordable Business Intelligence solution. The desktop version of Power BI is free, and you can create immersive dashboards and reports both simple and complex without paying a penny.
While you may have to pay for accessing more features like sharing the Power BI dashboards, it’s affordable (around $10 a month).
The Q&A function is probably one of the best advantages of the Power BI dashboard.
To get actionable information, most BI tools require you to follow a number of complex steps and even coding. However, that’s now how Power BI functions.
The Q&A feature Power BI comes with allows you to ask questions using a natural language and get the information you want.
For instance, if you want to check the number of shoes sold. You can simply visit the Q&A section and enter “shoes sold by the state as a bar chart” This will display the information you need in the form of a bar chart.
Imagine you’re selling shoes/t-shirts on your website globally, and receiving thousands of queries and sales each day from customers. Also, you’re running marketing campaigns to improve your sales.
Now, how will you answer the following questions:
Well, if you have a few hundred customers, maybe you could manually check the data to answer these questions. However, if you have thousands of customers to deal with each day, manually checking the data would be a bad decision as it would be both time-consuming and ineffective.
And this is when Power BI comes in. With Power BI Dashboards, no matter how much data you deal with each day, you can easily answer all of the above questions within minutes. You just need to select the data source, select the attributes, do some dragging and dropping, and you’re done.
Power BI Dashboard basically helps you structure all types (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured) of data into a visually immersive and easy-to-understand format. And once you can understand the data easily, you can make better, well-informed, and data-driven decisions that benefit your business.
Regardless of which domain you belong to, if you have to deal with lots of structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data, Power BI is for you. So, in this section, we’ll talk about different departments within a company that uses or can use Power BI Dashboard.
Here are the top most common use cases of Power BI Dashboard:
The c-level executives can use the Power BI dashboard to understand operational KPIs such as profit, loss, net revenue, customer retention, etc. Dashboards also give insights into investor summaries and financial overviews. Here’s what a management Power BI Dashboard looks like:
The CFO and other folks in the finance department can have an overview of overall revenue, profit, total customers, performance by region, and whatnot. Here’s what a finance dashboard looks like:
Sales teams have to deal with huge volumes of data which can be cumbersome. However, Power BI makes it easy. With Power BI’s sales dashboard, the sales managers can visualize sales data such as total sales, opportunities, average velocity, etc. Here’s what a Sales dashboard looks like:
When it comes to managing companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, it can be hard for HR managers to manage everything. However, with Power BI HR Dashboard, the job becomes a piece of cake.
Using Power BI, HR managers can have a hawk-eye view of all the employees in the company. They can find the total number of employees, average salary, age, newly joined employees, and lots of other employee-related insights. Here’s what a Power BI HR dashboard looks like:
Marketers who wish to understand different marketing metrics like campaign success and how customers are interacting with their website can use Power BI’s marketing dashboard. Here’s what it looks like:
Apart from the above, the customer support teams and even the IT teams in large companies make use of Power BI for data analysis and make their jobs easy.
Please Note: The dashboard images mentioned above are just examples of what they look like. You can add or remove whatever feature you want as per your liking. What it means is that you can completely customize the Power BI dashboards according to your business requirements.
Here are some basic steps involved in creating BI Dashboards:
Download Power BI Desktop on your Windows device. You can visit this Microsoft’s official website to download the setup.
Once you’re done with the installation, collect the data. You can do that by either importing the data file (EXCEL spreadsheet) or connecting the MYSQL database or other data sources. As this step analyzes and imports the data, the process will take time.
Once you’re done importing/collecting the data, you’ll have the option to format the data before it’s loaded into Power BI. You can do that by simply clicking on the “Transform Data” button, or you can simply click on “Load” if you don’t wish to format it.
When you’re done loading the data, you can explore the dashboard. Based on what you need the dashboard for, you can add or remove fields. For instance, if you’re creating a dashboard for HR analytics, you’ll need fields such as employee age, average salary, attendance, etc.
After exploring the dashboard, you can add visualization elements that suit your purpose. While there are several options available such as pie charts, donut charts, line charts, scatter plots, area charts, etc., you need to choose the right visualization elements for displaying the right information.
For instance:
Piece of Advice: While you can follow the above steps to create a Power BI dashboard, the process requires a lot of time and effort. Also, by doing it on your own, you may not be able to experience all the advantages of the Power BI dashboard.
What’s more, even if you plan to hire a new team of experts in-house, it would burn huge holes in your pocket. So, what’s the solution? Hiring a Power BI consulting firm.
Hiring a Power BI consulting services company such as DataToBiz is the best decision that you can make. Here’s why:
Power BI is an indispensable business intelligence tool for any business that deals with tons of data each day. While there are other tools such as Tableau, Sisense, and Zoho Analytics in the same domain, Power BI tops the list because of the no-code drag-and-drop function, ease of use, and customization.
You visualize complex information using visualizations such as pie charts, donut charts, bar charts, linear charts, etc., in a report or dashboard and make well-informed data-driven decisions.
However, make sure to hire a Power BI consultancy firm such as DataToBiz, which has helped hundreds of companies in different domains develop, integrate, implement and customize dashboards. It’s because hiring a reliable consulting company can save you time, effort, and money and serve the purpose (of analyzing complex data) in the best possible manner.
They have the experience and agility to understand what’s possible and deliver to our expectations.
