How to solve business issues with Power BI
Table of contents
Power BI is one of the most powerful and versatile data analytic software packages that create a tangible difference for a business or organization’s business intelligence needs. Microsoft’s premier business analytics service is designed to enable access to interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities.
What sets Power BI apart from other services of the user interface for ordinary individuals to navigate around easily and use to make their reports and dashboards.
Before diving into how you can address common challenges and solve business issues with Power BI, let’s look at Power BI’s basic features and their benefits.
Primary Power BI features
1. Multiple appealing visualizations
Intelligence and analytics are indeed one of the main components of Power BI, but the feature that stands out for some is data visualization. Power BI provides many detailed and attractive visualizations, which can be used to create reports or dashboards. One neat feature is that the complexity of the final visualization is only limited by your imagination and skill.
2. Get Data features
Another highly praised feature of Power BI is its versatile Get Data feature which allows you to pull, use, and integrate data from various sources.
Those data sources are constantly updated and expanded each month, leaving Power BI as your one-stop solution for working on any data.
3. Filtering datasets
The data you gain from different sources used for either reports or dashboards is called a dataset.
One feature of Power BI is that this dataset can be composed of either one source or multiple sources. Additional versatility and options like filtering the dataset into smaller subsets according to your chosen parameters give you greater control over your results.
4. Customizable dashboards and reports
All that playing around with data has a purpose and an end goal: creating dashboards and reports.
A report is a detailed breakdown that looks into a single dataset. At the same time, a dashboard provides the highlights or important information and data from stories or reports in a visual form.
You can check out our detailed breakdown of the differences between Power BI dashboards and reports, but understand for now that they are vital facets in the Power BI ecosystem. There are many more features in Power BI which go a long way in making it a top-tier platform for business intelligence, but that basic introduction to the main ones will suffice for now.
Let’s take a look at how you can leverage those powerful features and solve business issues with Power BI.
How to solve business issues with Power BI solutions
1. Unavailability of immediate statistics
Statistics, figures, and numbers are the lifeblood of a business and organization, particularly those operating in today’s modern world, where business intelligence is essentially the brain of a company.
In that situation, consider what waiting on statistics and figures can mean for your business when you’re looking to make a major business decision but have to delay it because the data is not immediately available for several reasons.
That is not a situation you want to be entertaining outside the hypothetical realm, and luckily with Power BI solutions, you don’t have to.
Power BI provides instant access to a business’s data storage and analytics which means no more cumbersome delays. Additionally, its built-in functionality that makes it simpler to decipher and understand data with visualizations is a further boon. Not to mention, you can instantly share them with others.
2. Time consumed on presentation preparation
Presentations are a bane for everyone involved, agreed? Well, except for those who like the sound of their voice a bit too much. But, they are still an integral part of the corporate world, from pitching new investors to giving performance reviews to addressing shareholders.
Preparing for presentations and presentations are herculean tasks themselves, tedious and time-consuming, requiring a lot of elbow grease and legwork.
You not only have to collect the relevant data but then arrange it into a visually appealing and understandable form. Furthermore, some projects or presentations might necessitate months-long preparations that might mean the data you initially started working with becomes outdated.
Power BI solutions, meanwhile, get rid of that with a simple click of a button. With the Get Data feature, you can instantly access, source, and compile data from multiple sources. The powerful visualization and automated reporting tools mean that most of your job is done for you – what took weeks or days will take hours at most.
3. Lost a specific dataset and can’t find it?
Losing a dataset, particularly an important one, and its location can be a major nightmare scenario for organizations with poor data-keeping records and practices.
Recovering that dataset is a troubling scenario. Checking and searching through spreadsheets for a single dataset could take precious time and manpower.
Luckily, Power BI solutions curb exactly such a situation. Power BI’s intuitive, simple, and easy functions to search for data and datasets mean that no data is ever truly lost.
With further tools like data catalogs, natural language technology, and its Q&A feature, relocating and better understanding your data becomes a more routine and simple process.
4. Low-quality data
Old data might be valuable for a business to lose or stop using. At the same time, it might be of low quality or riddled with issues due to over time, poor past data-keeping practices, or other reasons.
One of the pro tips of Power BI solutions is that the software has some tools and features that can help you quickly identify data quality issues and provide numerous ways to resolve them.
One such example is Power Query which has abilities to clean and prepare data for analysis. Furthermore, data profiling tools can aid you in removing all inconsistencies, null values, and data quality problems.
Therefore, Power BI can give a facelift to your old data, so to speak, without the need to abandon its use or risk losing it.
5. Lack of foresight to see trends?
One problem even the most successful business can have is predicting and seeing future trends. Business is about survival, which means predicting scenarios based on reasonable assumptions and preparing for them.
A business lacking foresight and planning will ultimately one day fade away. Business intelligence and data analytics help to solve exactly that problem, and as we already mentioned before, there is no package better served for that than Power BI.
Power BI solutions can easily and quickly spot trends by analyzing your past data or data from other sources, and the Data Analysis Expressions provides further functionality for trends analysis.
The artificial intelligence capabilities, inherently built-in Power BI, can help your organization see the future using predictive analytics and other big data tools. This foresight can help businesses estimate any requirement, such as the need to recruit more employees, change a specific need, or further invest in technology.
6. Complex reporting tools?
Companies have often used custom firmware and software for reporting needs, creating a monopoly of power and a disconnect between report users and creators. Users depended on tech teams for whatever changes needed to be made in reports.
Power BI solutions help solve that business problem by demolishing that fictional wall and making report creation an easy and intuitive function at the press of a button. It renders report creation a process that any employee can easily learn for themselves, thus achieving cost and time efficiency by removing the need for tech teams. For example, with paginated reports, non-tech employees can do wonders.
How to manage the security of your business
Maintaining and managing the security of your business itself is another common concern and problem. One that is all too prevalent, especially due to advanced counterintelligence and hacking tools and services.
While Power BI also has robust security features of its own, sometimes you indeed need the help of professionals to overcome some shortcomings of Power BI.
With Syskit Point’s Power BI inventory and permission reports, IT admins get instant and accurate insights into facts, such as which data is exposed to whom, together with the intelligence of published reports and the corresponding time and data sources.
Start a free trial of Syskit Point to discover how you can stay in full control of your Microsoft 365 environment and ensure powerful insights into your Power BI ecosystem.