Why choose Power BI?

Of all the Business Intelligence tools on the market that promise to make analysis easier why choose Power BI?

First released less than ten years ago, Power BI has very quickly established itself as the market-leading Business Intelligence platform outpacing numerous legacy vendors in a very short space of time. The solution’s popularity has been rapid, so much so that it is now trusted by 97% of Fortune 500 companies.

The reason for Power BI’s success is the versatility and usability of the platform. Microsoft has put users of all levels at the heart of the tool’s design. Power BI is a truly accessible and intuitive platform that any user within an organisation can pick up and start generating meaningful analysis quickly.

So, what are some of the key reasons you should choose Power BI as your analytics tool of choice?

Access on the move

One of the key benefits of Power BI is the ability to securely access and view your data wherever you are.

Live Power BI dashboards and reports can be accessed on any device with native mobile BI apps available for Windows, iOS and Android. This allows your people to stay connected to your data wherever their role takes them. Useful features include the ability to make comments, markups or suggestions to reports, all while on the move.

Choose Power BI to enable self-service

The self-service and low-code/no-code nature of Power BI removes multiple challenges that organisations typically face when trying to empower teams to work with data. Power BI removes the need to have and rely upon, costly specialised in-house IT resources. Once a usable dataset has been created for your organisation, this can be published to the Power BI Online Service and made available for the whole organisation to develop reports with.

The self-service nature of Power BI enables business users to feel free and confident to work with data.

Connect to your data sources

With Power BI it is simple to get connected to your data anywhere and in any format. With the ever-expanding list of native connectors that are available, it is possible to connect to a wide range of data sources. Power BI can even scrape web pages and social media platforms, allowing organisations to track public opinion of its brand, services or products.

Effortless visualisations

Power BI offers a wealth of different visualisations out-of-the-box, from bar charts, pie charts, treemaps and more.

For those looking to go beyond the out-of-the-box functionality, Microsoft also provides a free marketplace for Power BI visuals. This marketplace allows users to access additional visuals such as word clouds, histograms, radar charts, infographics and Twitter timelines.

If you have the skills internally or a digital transformation partner to support you, can go even further by bringing in customer visualisations. Utilising the customer visuals SDK (software development kit), your organisation can define its own visuals and bring them into Power BI to get the precise look and feel required.

Built-in AI

Power BI users can leverage the advanced AI capabilities of Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services. Utilising custom functions, users can connect their data model to Azure and run advanced analytics such as scoring for sentiment or language detection.

The built-in AI capabilities of Power BI enables your people to get insights faster. The features easily reduce the amount of time spent wrangling data, freeing up your time to analyse the data presented and developing actions to drive change for your organisation.