How Microsoft Is Demystifying Business Intelligence With Their Self Service BI Tools

The term business intelligence (usually known simply as BI) covers a variety of analytic disciplines and technologies which allow business owners and analysts to acquire and transform corporate information, and then to produce useful reports and data visualizations. These visualizations (that may take the form of dashboards, scorecards, charts, maps, etc.) can then be made open to stakeholders looking for timely information in order to make smarter business decisions.

The need for self-service BI

Traditionally, once the term BI was used, it meant enterprise-wide business intelligence, major projects and timescales, and significant costs. The tools found in BI projects were expensive and required a fair amount of technical expertise to implement.

As the explosion of online business transactions make businesses more technical within their operational structures, the necessity for constant up-to-date reporting has made the traditional BI model less than ideal. People now must be able to access corporate data and produce the reports and visualizations they need, without having to depend on IT specialists. The answer to this dilemma has been the development of self-service BI; the DIY approach to business intelligence.

Power BI Training Courses -service BI model frees up IT professionals to focus on complex back-end development tasks by allowing users themselves to create the analytical queries, reports and visualizations they want. However, if it's to be successful, it is important that the various tools which are employed be simple enough for a non-specialist to understand. That's where Microsoft have a huge edge over their competitors: they own Microsoft Excel.

Excel comes with an extremely wide user base and, because of its lightweight and flexible nature, it is as relevant to an engineer as to a statistician; in short, everybody uses Excel. It is therefore not surprising that Microsoft's self-service BI tools are based around the core functionality of Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Power BI

The Microsoft product which best fits the self-service BI label is named Power BI for Office 365. It is a cloud-based enterprise product which, as the name suggests integrates with the cloud version of Microsoft Office. It runs on the SharePoint back-end, with the idea of Power BI sites, make it possible for collaboration and allow users to easily share reports and visualizations with their colleagues.

Another key facet of Power BI may be the support it provides for users to access data using a selection of devices. Basically, any device that supports HTML 5 can now be used to see an electrical BI site.

Power BI provides its core analytic functionality via four key Microsoft Excel add-ins: Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map.

Power Query

The Power Query add-in permits you to connect to a multitude of data sources both inside your organization and online; and design very flexible and sophisticated rules for the transformation and refinement of the data that's being retrieved. For instance, you might create a query which combines data from two different sources; either by taking some columns from source A plus some from source B, or by appending records from source B to the end of source A. Whatever transformations you connect with the query, each time the info source is refreshed, these same transformation rules will be reapplied.

Power Query even features its query language, simply called M. As you utilize the query editor and apply transformations to the data, Power Query automatically generates the necessary statements. However, if you have enough time and the inclination to really get your head around the syntax, also you can write your own M statements.

Power Pivot

Power Pivot, which has been available as another add-in since Excel 2010, is now integrated into Excel and plays the central role in Microsoft's self-service BI solution. It allows you to create a data model, using data from disparate sources, either imported using Power Pivot itself or using Power Query.

Power Pivot lets you create relationships between different tables, together with defining key performance indicators and hierarchies for used in pivot tables, making life easier both for yourself and for colleagues needing these features because of their reports.

Power View

Power View is used for interactive exploration of one's data and for creating visualizations, reports and presentations. The Power View interface will seem familiar to Excel users, since it closely resembles the interface used when creating pivot tables. Each report you generate is called a view and typically focuses on one particular facet of your data using one of the available visualization types, for instance a table, chart or map.

Power View also features a full screen presentation mode, nearly the same as a PowerPoint slide show, where navigation buttons let you move between the various views.

Power Map

The Power Map add-in provides 3-D visualization of geographical and time-based data, either on a globe or on a custom map. In addition, it enables you to create tours which illustrate changes as time passes; for instance, the gradual upsurge in sales in a particular country. These tours can be played in Excel or you can also save them as videos and upload them to your corporate YouTube channel.

It's the custom map feature, in particular, which makes Power Map so useful; because this permits you to truly personalize your visualizations. The custom map could show the layout of a store, a close-up of a product, our body, a football pitch; whatever you had a need to use to illustrate your unique data.