Power BI is one of the best data visualization tools that easily organizes data in a comprehensive way. It has continued to help users make business decisions with confidence.

One of the main reasons why Power BI is awesome is that one can easily create a dashboard that provides various insights at a glance. For example, if a business is a franchise, one can have customer insights on total sales, total profits received, amount of profit or loss per region and customer specific growth and profit measurement among other insights all on one page.

Below are some interesting things you can do with Power BI.

Cool things you can do with Power BI 

1. Use data from other sources

In cases where you think that data you do not have can provide insight, Power BI makes it easy for you to get this free or paid data from elsewhere.

A great example is Sunesis Consulting’s COVID-19 Power BI dashboard that used data collected from an external source to provide insight into rate of infection in different regions among other important COVID-19 details. Check it out here: https://sunesiskenya.com/demo/

2. Ask simple questions and get responses

The beauty of Power BI dashboards is that you can use simple language to ask questions and get responses that provide more insight into your data. As CIO shares as an example, “you can 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?” Further Power BI suggests questions if there are tiles pinned to the dashboard.

3. Tell a story using data

Through the different chart options provided by Power BI, you can easily tell a story using data. You can break down data using line graphs, grids, custom shapes you can create a message that’s easy to understand for the audience you are presenting to.

An example that CBIZ shared is, “rather than showing various graphs of sales per region, show a video that shows sales as growing & shrinking circles over time, on a map of the areas you cover. This gives the audience a visual feel for how things have gone or can go in your forecast”.

4. Boost Microsoft Excel abilities

An integration between Microsoft Excel and Power BI features like the DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) can help you do much more with Excel.

DAX is “a collection of functions, operators, and constants that can be used in a formula, or expression, to calculate and return one or more values. You can use DAX to solve several calculations and data analysis problems, which can help you create new information from data that is already in your model.”

Aside from the Dax formula language, you’ll learn:

  • How to confidently load and transform data using Power Query
  • How to create Data Models and the importance of doing so before diving into creating visualizations
  • Bringing Data to life by telling a compelling story and much more.
5. Share real-time analytics

You can stream data and update dashboards in real-time on Power BI.  From e-commerce sites to factory/ retail sensors, or social media sites, visuals in Power BI can display data in real-time. This helps business owners to see the current state of the organization and success of marketing campaigns among other important insights.