Business Intelligence Tools, Why PowerBI is the Best Tool
While working in corporate, I have learned many things. One of the few things I have learned is that data is everything. Data is being collected every day and it is used to make high-level decisions. However, the data being collected isn’t necessarily ready for users. Someone has to take the data and change it so that it is ready for executives to use. This is where business intelligence tools come in. Business intelligence or BI tools, are software that gathers data, cleans it up, and creates visualizations for executives to look at to make decisions. In my opinion, one of the best BI tools is PowerBI.
PowerBI is Microsoft’s business intelligence tool. But how does it work exactly? PowerBI allows users to import data from various sources, and you can clean and transform data within PowerBI. After that, you can use the different visualization tools provided by PowerBI to create anything you need. Some examples of the visualizations available are bar graph, pie charts, line graphs, and etc. Because PowerBI is part of Microsoft’s ecosystem, you can connect and integrate PowerBI into the ecosystem directly. Also, due to Microsoft’s brand name and its influence in the business world, there are tons of third-party software and APIs that will allow you to connect to PowerBI so you can import the data directly into PowerBI. Then you can create dashboards and visualizations that will help executives or anyone who needs it.
There are tons of different business solutions out there, but what makes PowerBI better than others? One reason is because of who created PowerBI. Microsoft created PowerBI and because of all the integrations I mentioned, this automatically gives it an upper hand. However, name alone can’t be the biggest reason a product does well, the product also has to be good and provide value. It’s because PowerBI is still a top notch BI tool, it comes with great and ready to use visualizations, it has the flexibility to design the dashboard as you like, and there are multiple ways to gather data and prepare them on the tool itself. Microsoft also actively invests in PowerBI and especially with Copilot coming out and it being integrated into the product. PowerBI is still growing and changing.
The value in BI tools, especially PowerBI, is how it helps users visualize key information. We can’t make decisions based on how we think or feel. We need hard data and facts to back up our decisions. Before a company decides to push out a new product, they need to know if their current product is still being used and producing a profit. BI tools can help gather the necessary data and in one quick visual, show you if your product is making a profit, and that visual is made through combing through data, cleaning it, organizing it, creating dashboards and visualizations, and writing codes. BI has a lot of moving parts, but learning how to use them, help show key information that benefits an organization greatly.
That is why I decided to invest in learning PowerBI. I try and spend a few hours a week to learn something new and implement it directly into the dashboards. Even at work, I create a few simple dashboards to visualize website reports so that different departments can learn how users view our websites and which pages are viewed the most. Through this, the organization can now prioritize the webpages that get the most traffic or find a way to increase traffic to certain sites. I also am learning DAX codes, which is a coding language for PowerBI. I also take my skills in design to design my dashboards in a way that is appealing. PowerBI is a great tool and more and more companies are realizing its value. Taking the time to learn and use PowerBI will only add to your skillset.