Key Benefits of Microsoft Power BI
With large amounts of data more accessible than ever before, it becomes harder for organisations to extract value and make data-driven decisions without the correct business intelligence and reporting tools. In this article, we explore some of the key benefits of one of the leaders in this space, Microsoft Power BI.
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In today’s business landscape organisations across every industry must become more data-driven and agile to enable them to rapidly adapt to the market’s ever-changing needs and become more strategic. However, with so much data at their fingertips and sometimes across multiple systems or solutions, it can be difficult for organisations to extract the value from the data without the correct business intelligence or reporting tools.
A leader in the space, Microsoft’s Power BI is a self-service data analytics platform that helps organisations easily create powerful data visualisations that can make for easier data analysis. Microsoft’s Power BI has been positioned as a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for the 15th consecutive year. So if your organisation is exploring business intelligence tools, it is likely you have come across Power BI. Below we explore some of the key benefits of Microsoft’s Power BI in order to help organisations decide if it is the right tool for their organisation.
Personalised Dashboards
One of the most powerful features of Power BI is its interactive dashboards that can be completely customised to suit the needs of your organisation to produce powerful data models and visualisations. Dashboard creation is user-friendly with easy drag and drop functionality allowing users to generate custom reports. New Microsoft AI updates help the users less familiar with data analysing to find insights from unstructured and structured data.
Access To Real-Time Data
Power BI connects users to data in real-time, with data refreshing several times a day updating information and dashboards with new visuals and information. This allows users to identify bottlenecks, and opportunities and get ahead of potential problems in a timely manner. Data can be analysed as it's happening to help users keep on top of it. Power BI enables teams to collaborate through sharing dashboards or reports within Power BI workspaces. Power BI can be added as a tab within Microsoft Teams to further encourage collaboration. They can also be embedded in an external site or via links through Outlook.
Seamless Integration
Power BI supports a wide range of data sources and seamlessly integrates with all Microsoft products such as Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Apps, SharePoint and Office 365. There is also great connectivity with other third-party tools and solutions while also offering connection to data files and SQL server databases allowing users to analyse and report on data sets from all different sources in a unified space. One integration that business users find quite useful is the excel integration as it is often a tool that users often rely on when it comes to reporting and analysing data. With seamless integration between Power BI and Excel, users can easily connect data models, queries and reports to a Power BI dashboard to create powerful visualisations.
Updates & Support
Due to Power BI being a self-service business intelligence platform, it empowers users to create reports and analyse data without the need for IT intervention. Through easy-to-use functionality such as intuitive graphic design tools and a drag-and-drop interface, business users can use the tool effectively with little IT experience. As a cloud-based solution, there are regular monthly updates for Power BI that are automatically applied for users. There is also a strong Power BI community and Microsoft often listens to and applies popular suggestions for functionality to the platform. This eliminates the need for businesses to upgrade their solutions on a regular basis and allows users to continually have access to the most up to version and features to help support them in their data analysis.
Cost-Effective
In comparison to similar business intelligence and analytics tools, Power BI is somewhat inexpensive and affordable, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. There is also a number of versions of Power BI that are suitable for many different business requirements. For instance, you can download Power BI desktop which is the free version and start running reports instantly. There is also Power BI Pro which you can pay for on a per user per month basis. Power BI Pro allows for additional features such as embedding reports into other applications, sharing reports and integrations. Further, there is Power BI premium which may be more suited to larger organisations with many users as it offers increased data capacity limits and much more.
If you would like to learn more about how Power BI can help your organisation become more data-driven, get in touch to speak with one of our specialists.
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