Welcome to the Iamdata Solutions Asset Management Monthly Newsletter December 2022
Power BI Dashboard to view and analyse my data.
Power BI has been around for some time now and more and more organsiations have discovered how it can help them get insights from their data. So, let’s look at Power BI in more detail and explore the various components that make up Power BI.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that allows you to connect to many different data sources and allows you to build interactive reports and visualisations that can be easily published and shared with others within your organisation. One of Power BI's strengths is that it can connect to many different data sources and more connections are being added daily.
The basic version is free to download and has lots of functionality. Power BI is a Microsoft product and, as you would expect, has tight integration with other Microsoft products such as Excel, Azure, and SQL Server and connects to most types of databases.
Power BI components:
Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is a development tool for Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View. Power BI Desktop provides everything you need under the one roof.
Power Query
Power Query is the data transformation and mash-up engine. It enables you to discover, connect, combine, and refine data sources to meet your analysis needs.
Power Pivot
Power Pivot is a data modelling and calculation engine. It uses Data Analysis Expression (DAX) language to model data. It also allows you to establish relationships and grade calculations.
Power View
Power View is the data visualisation component that can connect to data sources and can filter data for individual data visualisation elements or the entire report.
Power Map
Power Map is used to visualise geospatial data in 3D mode. Power Map works with Bing maps based on latitude, longitude or country, state, city, or street address information.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Power Q & A
Power Q & A is a natural language engine for questions and answers to your data model. Once you’ve built your data model and deployed you can ask questions about the data in natural language and Power BI will use built in AI to try and answer your questions.
Personally, I don't really use this feature as I find Power BI doesn't really understand the questions I'm asking. I would much rather build a visual myself in Power BI. Microsoft's Q & A demo here: power-bi/visuals/power-bi-visualization Q & A
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Visualisations
The Key Influencer visual is an artificial intelligence (AI) visualization in Power BI. It helps you understand the factors that drive a specific metric. A Key Influencer visual displays the major contributors to a selected result or value.
Why Should We Use Power BI?
Power BI has the ability to access vast volumes of data from multiple sources and allows you to view, analyse, and visualise huge quantities of data that cannot be opened some applications – Excel for example. Power BI uses powerful compression algorithms to import and cache the data within the .PBIX file.
Power BI allows you to present the data in visually appealing formats. Humans are visual creatures and we like seeing the data presented in a nice graph or bar chart that’s easy to understand at a glance.
Power BI has a drag and drop functionality with features that allow you to copy all formatting across similar visualisations, which makes it relatively easy to design a good looking visual and copy the formatting across to other visuals to help maintain the theme throughout the Power BI Dashboard.
Power BI has integration with all Microsoft Office applications, which makes it even easier to share your reports with staff in your organisation. Using Power BI with Azure can reduce the time it takes to get insights and increase collaboration between business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.
Power BI allows you to get insights from your data allowing you to make data-driven business decisions.
Power BI allows you to perform real-time stream analytics. Power BI can fetch data from sensors (such as smart water meters), social media sources (such as rainfall, air quality, demographic information, etc) and access real-time analytics.
Power BI Architecture
Power BI architecture is a service built on top of Azure. There are multiple data sources that Power BI can connect to. Power BI Desktop allows you to create reports and data visualizations on the dataset. Power BI gateway is connected to on-premise data sources to get continuous data for reporting and analytics.
Power BI Service
Power BI service is the Software as a Service (SaaS) part of Power BI. It is also referred to as Power BI online. To access Power BI service, you need to log into app.powerbi.com. You have to be logged in to view your workspace where all your Power BI dashboards have been published.
Power BI Terminology - Dashboard / Canvas / Report
A Power BI dashboard is a single page, often called a canvas, that tells a story through visualisations. Because it's limited to one page, a well-designed dashboard contains only the highlights of that story. Readers can view related reports for the details. Dashboards are a feature of the Power BI service only.
A Power BI report is a multi-perspective view into a dataset, with visuals that represent different findings and insights from that dataset. A report can have a single visual or pages full of visuals.
The Flow of Work in Power BI
One common workflow in Power BI begins by connecting to data sources in Power BI Desktop and building a report. You then publish that report from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI service, and share it so business users in the Power BI service and on mobile devices can view and interact with the report.
This workflow is common, and shows how the three main Power BI elements complement one another.
In my view, PowerBI is a very powerful reporting tool that would help any organisation and local government department to understand, analyse and and draw insightful information from their data assisting with evidence based decision making.
I’ve written a few blogs about Power BI, you can read some of them here:
I have worked on many different projects with my Local Government clients, from designing and developing Power BI Reports, to building SQL Server databases for spatial data, to managing and maintaining the GIS and the Asset Management systems. If you'd like to discuss how we might work together, then please email me at ➡️ jill.singleton@iamdata.solutions
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