Introduction to Power BI

You’re a data person. You know how spreadsheets work. You understand your data. But there’s so much data to process, and your spreadsheets aren’t cutting it. You need a way to visualize the data and share it with business users so that they can see the analytics, understand the data like you do, and even manipulate the visualizations with little to no training. If that’s why you’re looking at this book, you made the right move. Microsoft Power BI is exactly what you need, and this book will show you how to get up to speed quickly so you’ll be building and publishing reports that will wow your colleagues and make your mom proud. Microsoft Power BI is a data analytics and visualization tool powerful enough for the most demanding data scientists, but accessible enough for everyday use for anyone needing to get more from their data. In the beginning, back when life was simpler (in 2011), Power BI was just a simple piece of desktop software. But it isn’t anymore. It’s an entire business intelligence (BI) ecosystem that can fit into multiple diverse technology stacks. In this chapter, we’ll introduce Microsoft Power BI, discuss the entire Power BI family of products, provide an overview of how Power BI works, and look at what distinguishes it from other similar tools.