BI | 7 Valuable Tips for Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft’s interactive data visualisation and analytics tool for business intelligence (BI). Power BI is used to pull data from a wide range of systems within the cloud to create dashboards that track the metrics you care about the most, or drill in and (literally) ask questions about your data. Power BI also allows you to create rich reports or embed dashboards and reports into reporting portals you already use! How good is that! The dashboards, reports and visualisations you can create go far beyond bar and pie charts, but what’s even better is that you don’t need to be a designer to use them. Here at Advance Business Consulting we have shared 7 valuable tips that will help you gain greater insights from the information you already have, in more areas than you might expect.Let's get into it.

1. Visualise the services you use

Power BI is easily accessible with Microsoft, but what you may not know is that it has hundreds of content packs, templates, and integrations for hundreds of data services and apps—and not just Microsoft ones like Dynamics 365 and SQL Server.

Connect your apps to data

Data is at the core of every app. We make it easy to get your data into your apps with over 200 connectors for many popular cloud services and even your on-premises data.

For example, if your business uses Xero for accounting, K2 Cloud to build business processes, Adobe Marketing Cloud, SAP HANA, Salesforce, MailChimp, Marketo, Google Analytics, or even GitHub, Power BI can be used to visualise the data in those services, create reports against them, and bring them together in a custom dashboard—a CEO's dream!What's also great is the ability to set up the on-premises gateway to use Power BI to explore data sets on your servers. That way you can compare website visitors with sales, or see which promotions have brought in new customers. You can create your reports and visualisations, perform calculations (Power BI calls these calculated measures) and set access levels for individual users, data sources, or specific dashboards and reports to control who can view more sensitive information.

2. Tell stories with your data

We all know charts are great for numbers, but if you want to show information that changes over time in a way that’s easier to understand, try the new Timeline Storyteller custom visual for Power BI. This allows you to create a linear list of dates or times or lay them out in circles, spirals, grids or custom shapes. You can also show a chronological list, a sequence that shows the duration of events, or pick relative or logarithmic scales. Pick how to best represent, scale and lay out your data and Power BI will build a timeline from it; use that to tell the history of your business, show how demand is growing, or explain anything else in which the sequence of events matters.

3. Explore ‘What-ifs’

You can spend time comparing different scenarios in Excel, but Power BI lets you do it by dragging a slider bar to show changes. Add a calculated measure for a figure such as revenue and you can use the New Parameter button in Power BI Desktop to add parameters that change in your What-if scenario – setting the data type, minimum, maximum and increments. That creates a calculated measure that you can reference in other calculated measures; so if you create a What-if parameter for the number of customers who respond to a particular promotion you can plug that into a formula that you create to show how many customer support tickets you can expect to have to deal with. Tick “Add slider to this page” in the What-if parameter dialogue to add a slider bar that you can drag to show the difference when the number of customer responses is higher or lower. Forecasting has never been easier!

4. Ask questions in real time

Instead of designing charts and reports, use the natural language features of Power BI to ask questions and get visualisations in response. You can specify the way the data is presented — ask for “total sales by region by month as a line” — or let Power BI pick a layout that suits the data with a more general question like “What were the sales numbers for last quarter?”.

If there are tiles pinned to the dashboard, Q&A will suggest those as questions, and as you type a question it will suggest terms you could add based on the tables in the data set. If the question turns out to be extremely useful, you can pin the visualisation to the dashboard, making this an easy way to create visualisations for a data set. If you own the data set, you can also add featured questions in the dashboard settings. Q&A uses the names of tables, columns and calculated fields in the data sets; if the column is called area rather than region, you’d need to ask for “sales by area” unless you add synonyms, and table names like CustomerSummary will make Q&A less natural than names like Customers (even though Q&A would know that’s the table you want if you ask about “customer summaries in Chicago” because it can break words up and understand plurals).

Power BI Q&A works on the Power BI website and the iOS Power BI app. It can work on data stored in an Excel table (or in a database via the on-premises gateway if you enable Q&A for the data set) or you can use Power Pivot to optimise the data set for Q&A. Make sure all the tables in your data set are joined correctly, check data types for dates and numbers, and create the default field set for columns and default label for tables to tweak the columns displayed and the type of graph or chart Q&A will show.

5. Implement custom visualisations

Power BI includes a good range of visualisations, and you can add more, either by downloading them from the Microsoft Store or by creating your own with the open-source Power BI Custom Visual Tool (which uses CSS, TypeScript and NodeJS). Don't stress, our team is experienced in implementing custom reporting for you. 

The Office Store includes visualisations from Microsoft, like word clouds, a correlation plot based on R script, chord charts to show interrelationships in a circular matrix, the “box and whisker plot” that highlights outliers, clusters and percentiles to show data that might otherwise get lost in summarised figures like averages, as well as visualisations created by other Power BI customers.