Visualizations With Power-BI
Power-BI is a data visualization tool by Microsoft, with its main focus on business intelligence. It simplifies creation of dashboards as compared to Excel. One advantage of Power-BI over excel is that it can get data from various sources. Currently there are about 99 different sources Power-BI loads/extracts data from, including:
- Excel
- Text/CSV
- XML
- JSON
- SharePoint
- MS Access
- Oracle
- SQL
- SAP
- Facebook, etc.
Upon loading your data, you can choose to transform data if data is messy or untidy, or you can work directly with loaded data if it is clean and up to par.
“To properly use Power-BI, you must first have basic knowledge of Excel and data analytics process.”
Advantage of Power-Bi over Excel
1. Faster processing: I usually work with large data using Excel. This is usually a strenuous task as Excel becomes slow when your data is large. Imagine typing to delete about 20,000 rows from a dataset, this slows down rate of reporting, however with PowerBI, the issue of slowness is resolved.
2. Appealing dashboards with interactive UI/UX features: even a PowerBI newbie can do one or two things without necessarily knowing much about the software, it can be self-taught.
3. Access to information in real-time: due to the various sources of data extraction, data can be gotten in real time and reports updated.
4. Easy to learn: it’s quite an easy tool to learn.
5. High level Analytics: while excel can give beautiful visualizations, it is also limited. PowerBI offers more visualizations including:
a. Column chart: stacked column chart, clustered column chart
b. Bar chart: stacked bar chart, clustered bar chart,
c. Line and clustered column chart
d. Line and stacked column chart: these two could be used to check profit trends
e. Waterfall
f. Line charts
g. Pie charts and Donuts charts
h. Tree map,
i. Tables, matrices,
j. Gauge map
k. Scatter chart
l. Area chart
m. Maps: a Geographical map
In the next few articles, we’d look into more of these charts deeply with some examples. You could always either download PowerBI desktop or use the online version to practice these visualizations.
Keep learning, keep growing.
Ciao ...
