Power BI Services and Benefits

Table Of Content: Power BI Services and Benefits

What is a Power BI Service?

Power BI service is a cloud-based business analytics and data visualization service that enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of data through easy-to-use dashboards, interactive reports, and compelling visualizations that bring data to life.

The Power BI service website is built upon the azure cloud platform and adhere to HTML 5 standard. It has robust support for HTML5 via what is called PowerView.

The Data Sets for Power BI Service include

  1. Uploaded Excel, CSV, or Power BI Desktop files.
  2. Linked Excel, CSV, or Power BI Desktop files residing on OneDrive for Business or OneDrive Personal.
  3. Data are available in your organization's content packs. Content packs are "pre-packaged" dashboards, datasets, and reports specific to your organization and are only available in Power BI Pro.
  4. Data from other online services content packs; these services range from Bing to GitHub to MailChimp to SalesForce.
  5. Data from SQL Azure Databases and Data Warehouses are also available, but it is also only available to Power BI Pro subscribers
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Features of Power BI

Related Article: Visuals Lists & Chart Types

 

What are the main features of Power BI Service?

The Main Features of Power BI Service UI are the following:

  1. Navigation pane (left nav)
  2. Canvas (in this case, dashboard with tiles)
  3. Q&A question box
  4. Icon buttons, including help and feedback
  5. Dashboard title (navigation path, aka breadcrumbs)
  6. Office 365 app launcher
  7. Power BI home button
  8. Labeled icon buttons 

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1. Workspace

 Workspaces are containers for dashboards, reports, workbooks, and datasets in Power BI.

There are two types of workspaces: my workspace and app workspaces

  • My Workspace: My workspace is the personal workspace for any Power BI customer to work with their content. Only you have access to your My workspace. If you want to share any of your content, you have several choices: create an app workspace where you bundle content into an app and make it available to others in your organization, or create an app workspace and give colleagues access to that workspace so you can share and collaborate.
  • App Workspace: App workspaces are used to collaborate and share content with colleagues. They are also the places where you create, publish, and manage apps for your organization. Think of them as staging areas and containers for the content that will make up a Power BI app. You can add colleagues to your app workspaces and collaborate on dashboards, reports, workbooks, and datasets. All app workspace members need Power BI Pro licenses, but app consumers don't necessarily need Pro licenses.

2. Datasets

Datasets are a collection of data we will use in power bi. We can import data or establish a connection to cloud data sets over HTTP. Datasets are associated with the workspace. In the workspace, we work on data. A dataset can be part of multiple workspaces.

 

Datasets

One data:

  • can be used over and over in one or in many workspaces. 
  • can be used in many different reports. 
  • Visualizations from that one dataset can display on many different dashboards.
  • We can rename, refresh and remove datasets.

[ Related Article: Introduction to Power BI Slicers ]

3. Reports

A Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations (charts and graphs like line charts, pie charts, treemaps, and many many more). Visualizations are also called visuals. All of the visualizations in a report come from a single dataset. Reports can be created from scratch within Power BI, can be imported with dashboards that colleagues share with you, or can be created when you connect to datasets from Excel, Power BI Desktop, databases, SaaS applications, and apps.

Reports can be accessed by two methods

  1. Editing
  2. Reading

Only the person who created the report, co-owners, and those granted permission, have access to all of the exploring, designing, building, and sharing capabilities of Editing View for that report. And the people they share the report with can explore and interact with the report using Reading View.

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One report

  • is contained in a single workspace that can be associated with multiple dashboards within that workspace (tiles pinned from that one report can appear on multiple dashboards). 
  • can be created using data from one dataset. (the slight exception to this is that Power BI Desktop can combine more than 1 dataset into a single report and that report can be imported into Power BI)

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4. Dashboard

A dashboard is something you create in the Power BI service or something a colleague creates in the Power BI service and shares with you.

  • is associated with a single workspace
  • can display visualizations from many different datasets
  • can display visualizations from many different reports
  • can display visualizations pinned from other tools (e.g., Excel)

Workbooks are special datasets.

Related Article: Power BI Architecture: A Complete Tutorial

What are the Benefits of PowerBI Services?

Below are the key advantages of Power BI Services:

Integrates seamlessly with existing applications: Power BI integrates easily with your existing business environment allowing you to adopt analytics and reporting capabilities. Microsoft Azure consultants can also help you in leveraging this intuitive tool to embed interactive visuals in your applications easily. 

Rich personalized dashboards: The crowning feature of Power BI is the information dashboards, which can be customized to meet the exact need of any enterprise. You can easily embed the dashboards and BI reports in the applications to provide a unified user experience. 

Publish reports securely: The tool helps you to set up automatic data refresh and publish reports allowing all the users to avail of the latest information. 

No memory and speed constraints: Shifting an existing BI system to a powerful cloud environment with Power BI embedded eliminates memory and speed constraints ensuring data is quickly retrievable and analyzed.

No specialized technical support required: Power BI provides agile inquiry and analysis without the need for specialized technical support. It supports a powerful natural language interface and the use of intuitive graphical designer tools.

Extracting business intelligence rapidly and accurately: It helps in transforming your enterprise data into rich visuals, thus extracting business intelligence for enhanced decision making.

Balanced simplicity and performance: The in-memory analysis technology and DAX scripting language are both exquisite examples of a balance between simplicity and performance.

Supports Advanced Data services: Microsoft Power BI tool can be integrated seamlessly with advanced cloud services like Cortana or Bot framework. Thus, providing results for the verbal data query given using natural language.

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Last updated: 04 Apr 2023
About Author

Vinod M is a Big data expert writer at Mindmajix and contributes in-depth articles on various Big Data Technologies. He also has experience in writing for Docker, Hadoop, Microservices, Commvault, and few BI tools. You can be in touch with him via LinkedIn and Twitter.

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