Power BI

Today we will take a look at one tool that is famous and useful for data visualisation it is Microsoft Power BI. I have just started to learn this tool and therefore I wanted to share some of my experiences and findings about this tool with you. I am hopping this article will help to those who wants to explore the features of this tool.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

According to MS website Power BI is a business analytics service that delivers insights to enable fast, informed decisions.

1. Transform data into stunning visuals and share them with colleagues on any device.

2. Visually explore and analyze data-on-premises and in the cloud-all in one view.

3. Collaborate on and share customized dashboards and interactive reports.

4. Scale across your organization with built-in governance and security.

Where we can use this tool?

1. For analysts:

2. Quickly go from data to insight to action.

3. Connect to hundreds of sources, prep data with ease, and create beautiful reports, all in minutes.

4. For IT:

5. Simplify management, achieve compliance, and keep data secure while giving people access to the insights they need.

6. For Developers:

7. Bring your apps to life with data.

8. Easily embed high-quality data visuals and deliver compelling reports on any device.

Found some useful videos on the tool that I am sharing here:

Features that I found very useful:

1. No need of Data Pipeline to fetch data:
   

2. You can pull data from many different sources such as Google BQ, Cassandra, MySQL or from files on local machine in one place where BI Desktop is running for analysis.

3. Getting data on Power BI is very easy and less time consuming compared to establishing separate Datapipeline for the data fetching from the data source.

4. You can run Python code in Power BI. This feature is very important. Since if we want to use Pandas operations before generating visualisations.

5. It’s less costly than Tableau. Therefore Startups or small scale company can use it.

6. Also we can use DirectQuery feature which allows us to interact with data on data source without copying it in the Power BI desktop. This is useful specially when we are generating report on real time data.

Some limitations that I find when using Power BI:

1. As of now I do not find any way to use Anaconda Jupyter notebook to use data in power BI for more complex operations that Power BI can not perform in Machine Learning.

2. Also there is 1 GB limit for each dataset in the Power BI service, and maximum of 2 billion rows, and 16000 columns.

3. Also I do not find information regarding how to install and use it on Ubuntu server 😦

That’s it. If you have any questions feel free to ask in comment section below and also if you find this article useful please like and subscribe to my blog 🙂