Introduction to Power BI

Introduction of power bi, what is power bi well power bi is nothing but an again a tool which is used to attain business intelligence guys so it is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data share insights across your organization in your inside your teams outside your teams you know even to a different organization as well and then later whatever graphs visualizations you have put out from your data you can put it in an application you can put it on a website and show them and use them later as well guys so basically it allows you to connect hundreds and hundreds of data sources and bring your data to life with live dashboarding and reports.

This is what you can see right so you have certain numbers which might not make sense but then at the end of the day if you convert numbers to these beautifully looking graphs and visualizations that have so much impact for a non-technical person for a person who’s from a business domain or let’s say in a board of directors meeting as well because at the end of the day visualizations and images attract the human uh consensus pretty much.

 Three thousand times faster than numbers is what uh it’s something that I read last year so on that note why do you have to use power bi in particular it’s an offering from Microsoft as you guys might know it and power bi is again a giant in the world of business intelligence guys so the first reason of why you should use power bi is to help you make informed decisions very quickly and not just informed decisions not informed in just any simple way you’re gonna have all the details you’re gonna know your data in and out for visualizations to what your data is doing why it is acting.

 The way it is and what is the outcome and how good or bad is the outcome guys so all of these will help the company you know in terms of the associate level to the director you know to CEO levels and to help them basically take a very good decision and do this very quickly as well this brings us to the next reason of why you should consider power bi.

Power bi is you know this one tool with so many features that it pretty much you know help you connect your data connect your models it will help you model the data that you’re connecting and then pretty much you know you can explore your data you can create all of these very good looking visualizations visual reports basically and then you can talk to your multiple teams about it you can talk to just one team design.

A team is a business intelligence team, sales team you can have all of these guys collaborate pitching on what they want to see at the end of the day and then publish it to them and eventually share it to all your board members or other members of the teams as well guys so this brings us to the next reason of why you should consider uh power bi especially this particular reason because you know there’s a statement which I read it says that power bi pretty much is again one of the most well-faring bi tools in the world today and I think this reason pretty much this is a reason of why you should use bi connects to that uh basically what we are trying to say here is that you know you can take data from hundreds of sources.

 just said and no matter where your data lives power bi can connect it and pull it and pretty much give your visualizations based on that as well guys and not just any visualization you can have stunningly amazing looking interactive visualizations which will catch a lot of attention of a lot of people as well.

 You know there’s another reason which is again very good as a company collaboration is a foundation right so all your reports will get published among your teams all your dashboards will get published among your teams all of you guys together will come you know share insights about what’s going on all of you will have an idea of how your business is doing and this will help you understand your business inside out thoroughly.

What that further does is pretty much you know that will help you take uh uh you know uh your desk to wherever you go because at the end of the day power bi apps can talk to any of the apps built by Microsoft and all of these will give you very good seamless access to insights whenever you want you to know at your home at your office or if you’re on the move as well guys so this brings us to the actual process of how power bi works well to simplify it I’m going to take it very slowly since the intent here is to make the all of the audience from you know beginner level to the advanced level understand this.

 I’m going to be a little slow here and I hope you catch on to what I’m saying so this is how power bi works basically in the chain so there are you know pretty much five major steps of how it works step one is a data connection,  data transformation, data modeling, data visualization, and data reporting.

 The first step is data connection as I’ve already told you you can talk to hundreds of hundreds of resources at the same time and get the power bi to pretty much pull all the data from any let’s say Twitter Facebook it can be any big data solutions Hadoop you know hive pick any of these can talk to power bi and get the data into your system where it can be processed and worked on and the best part,

In my opinion about the data connection part of power, bi is that it is extremely simple to import data into power bi or let’s say you want to upload a custom file on your own and you just don’t want to pull data from anywhere else Microsoft power bi interface is so simple it makes it very easy even for a beginner to get started on this.

 Data transformation is the second step so after data loading what the data needs to be done at this point of time your data will be very unruly it will be very shabby it will be very raw there’s a good chance it will not be structured as well.

We do this step which is called preprocessing and pre-processing the literal term is data shaping or data transformation. in this preprocessing we do a lot of changes and transformations in the data so that the next steps become you know very easy and uh maintains very good accuracy as well processing how is it done well basically we can do a lot of changes to the data that’s present you know you can rename your columns you can rename your tables you can change the type of data.

You can convert text to numbers to text you can modify the rows modify the columns modify the data with every cell in the two-dimensional matrix of the data that you see and much more.

 Data transformation plays a very vital role as a second step into achieving very good visualization and this brings us right to the third step which is Data modeling is a very important step because data modeling will help you enhance your data in a way where you know when you’re doing visualization you do not pick up on any outliers or you do not pick up on any data which will hurt your visualizations and decrease the accuracy of your model.

We need to enhance our data we need to make sure that the data is extremely efficient it is extremely you know to the point where when we go ahead and graph it out it looks perfect.

Basically, how is this done well data can be enhanced by doing a lot of things you know you can do a lot of calculations on the data you can have some hierarchies you can map your data one to other you can have to give relations to your data you can have a certain set of measures where you know you’re pretty much asking your data to stay in a certain set of limits you can have we can build certain relationships among a couple of rows couple of columns and much much more.

Data visualization this is the heart of power bi because this is where pretty much your data goes from looking like numbers or something on a spreadsheet to graphs and not just any graphs those are beautiful looking visualization as I’ll just show it to you in a moment but then this is a very important step because you will not just have access to one or two types of graphs story,

You’ll have a variety you’ll have a plethora of visualization types where you know you can go on to use it based on your requirement this will feel like a tailor-made requirement to any company who require business intelligence and then since they offer loads and loads of tools for us it is one of the main reasons why power bi will give you these attractive looking amazing and beautiful reports.

This brings us to the biggest advantage is that you know let’s say you might have questions which are you might not have any coding experience but there is power bi for you as well as know that the advantage of power bi is that you know even a person who is an MBA who’s a business guy who has never written a single line of code in his life can whip up can come up with extremely good analytics using power bi,

This is a  very high paying job as well the average salary is very high and then if you can think about being in the information technology sector without writing a code business intelligence could be one of your ways to you know amassing a lot of wealth and at the same time enjoying your job because I love seeing visualizations as the output of power bi.

 Data reporting is what we try to do is power bi comes up with a lot of services there is much more than what meets the eye in terms of Microsoft services any services of course and then these dashboards are used to create reports these reports can be physically created they can be put on a website they can be published and exported in a very secure manner as well so it is not that you create a couple of graphs and you know anyone can access those graphs.

These are done under very high encryption and you can export it and publish it and much more as coming to another important point of data reporting is that you know it is not a manual task a power bi supports automatic data refresh which can be set up once and then uh left as is and what this does is this will give you almost real-time analytics of trends and results,

It will update itself on its own and you do not have to have a human there intervening putting in the new results you know putting in new visualizations and not so it supports an automatic data refresh and this, in my opinion, is a very good advantage of business intelligence.

 what are my roles and responsibilities if I am a bi developer if I am a data analytics developer so what are my roles and responsibilities in an organization visual automatically speak what why do you want this all why do you want to do this what is the importance of data in a personal level at a personal level how important the data is  to do that I want to do an activity I want  to help me in doing this activity and I want to do something like I want to create a small project,

project in a sense I want to define a process of purchasing a mobile phone this is my favorite example which makes sense to what the importance of data is purchased in a mobile phone nowadays everyone uses smartphone right now when adult we use a smartphone so I will there are a lot of things that I will consider before purchasing a mobile phone like screen size resolution memory camera many other many options are there that we consider and more importantly budget I define I have this requirement these are my requirements so these are my requirement based on this I will purchase a mobile phone.

Requirements in my mind what I do what the first step I do  we spend a little bit of time in understanding what product I have to purchase which brand phone I have to purchase isn’t it everyone does that first you go to youtube videos right you see various youtube videos we go to youtube videos for youtube reviews and many people nowadays they are putting their videos  as reviews,

The second source of information that I go and get information is I go to various websites say it is a gsm arena gadgets 360 and many other websites which will give me information on the various products and help me to compare and this is textual information is a third source is my family and friends suggestions isn’t it suggestions and which is an audio or verbal and finally comes another very important section of data that I have is my previous experience means before purchasing my current ex new phone I was using another phone right previously so previous experience so now this is my previous experience so all this so what’s the process let’s define a model of this entire process.

 A journey that starts in the information yes this is placed information now what I do after I get this information and I’ll collect this information in my mind I will call it a collection of data this is nothing but data right all for data, video data or textual data, audio data and our intelligence data.

what I do after that I clean that information I integrate that information so different structures of data see here video the data is coming from the video the data coming from the text the data is coming from audio so we have to merge all this information we call integration and the term that we use in id is extract transform and load so why do we do this because the data coming from different sources,

we need to merge to enable better data analytics it could be like data cleaning some of the time we don’t have headers we have to address the table sometimes you don’t have some missing values we have to filter those missing values so all this kind of cleaning is done here in integration part.

 After integrating this  getting the information from these four different sources what I will do with this information I will start analyzing this information because now everything is in a single place,

I’ll start analyzing this information now after analyzing what I do I will make a decision which is the next step and finally, I will decide which phone to take finally I’ll make a decision quality of the product that we purchase next money that we are spending we want to make work for this correct.

Everyone in our subconscious mind we do this but no one till today no one we never thought today this can be formulated no one tried to put this in a diagram and earlier the data which was getting generated as we have these four sources of data earlier back 20 years 30 years back we didn’t have much data that was getting generated so we didn’t give much importance for this process now when we have more and more data that is getting generated this process became much more complicated and for that this process some wise person gave the name as business intelligence bi.

This is a personal level you are just purchasing a mobile phone now think how will uh instead of purchasing a mobile phone if you are an owner of a mobile phone manufacturing company now the project got changed to selling a mobile phone then what do you follow the same steps again you follow the same step,

The complexity will increase the number of stages here will get increased means what number of source of information will be changed like if you are selling a mobile phone then you want to be best in the market when you will be the best in the market when you do proper analysis,

when you understand what customer is needing if you understand what mistakes I did in the past if you understand which are the age groups which who are preferring my products good who are preferring my products and if some countries are not having not using my mobile phone then what is that missing in my product that is not reaching the expectation so all these information that I collect and pass-through this cycle and help me to make a decision and I will just go to the market and implement the decisions.

The steps remain the same this cycle remains same the process remains the same but the steps will get added like after integrating think at the business level if you are integrating this something then you want to store that information,

here comes the storage see in my case I don’t need storage because I have my intelligence I can store in my mind but here we need storage and here analyzing before and after analyzing and decision making we have discussions with the stakeholders a lot of discussions will happen to see as the problem get bigger and bigger as the money involved get bigger and bigger,

The first number of persons involved will get larger then the steps involved in this process will increase but ultimately the goal is the same I want to just stand out and make my business profitable ultimate goal is that and how can I deliver this thing how can I deliver this to a business user how can I deliver this to my clients this information using tools like power bi.

Bi background hopes this makes sense to you because if you have if you are working on business intelligence then you’ll be familiar with this process but anyone new to bi who is aspiring to get into the field of business inclusions or data analytics could help you to understand your role now your role is we are not owning the company I’m not the owner but the Samsung or any mobile phone company owner will hire me to help him in doing this process and that is why power bi becomes a choice.

 Power bi can collect information from their number of source power bi can integrate clean the information power bi can store data inside it power bi will help us to analyze the information,

power bi will enable the business users to make decisions and to analyze the best way to analyze data is through visuals or charts because why charge there is no hardcore rule that we have to use charts only but that is human psychology that ninety percent of the information that a human mind can grasp is through visuals through variables especially through charts through the images charts a lot of information is captured by our mind so we prefer visualization that way the term came visual and visualization so like bar chart like pie chart we create charts to communicate.

 Take another chart here to think this is my chart a bar chart and I will draw a line here this is my sales and this is my year and these are the number of sales that are happening and now okay this is 2010 to 2014 because the size of the bar is highest I’m communicating a message to the end-user telling that in the year 2014 the sales were higher,

In 2015 it went down now the business user end-user he will think why the sales went down he will interact with the employees he will go and survey the market so why my products are not getting sold so that enable a business decision taking through visuals so we are communicating a message that we call it as storytelling means we are putting this as a story using the dashboards and that is where power bi comes into the picture and a power bi is a visualization tool where which will enable a user to collect the information to clean the information to store to analyze and help and ultimately help an end-user to make better decisions.

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