What is Power BI? First of all, BI stands for Business Intelligence. Power BI is part of the Power Platform by Microsoft. Wikipedia says: “Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, where end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on information technology staff or database administrators.”

Wikipedia goes on to say: “Power BI provides cloud-based BI services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop based interface, called “Power BI desktop”. It offers data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboards. In March 2016, Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud platform. One main differentiator of the product is the ability to load custom visualizations.” Power BI was first released to the general public on July 24, 2015.

At Microsoft’s website for Power BI they say this on the front page: “Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your organization. Connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify data prep, and drive ad-hoc analysis. Produce beautiful reports, then publish them for your organization to consume on the web and across mobile devices. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique, 360-degree view of their business. And scale across the enterprise, with governance and security built-in.”

Here is another YouTube video showing live data streaming called Power BI and Azure Stream Analytics demo by Amir Netz. There is an audience and they have decibel sensors that send data up to the cloud (Azure) and Power BI tools display the results in real time. Which side of the room is louder?

Learning Power BI

There are bunch of YouTube videos on Power Bi over here.

There is a short video on YouTube (only a few minutes) that introduces you to Power BI Desktop. Over at Udemy.com they have a free tutorial called Power BI – The Ultimate Orientation. It’s just over one hour long.

Kevin Stratvert has an introductory video on Power BI called How to use Microsoft Power BI – Tutorial for Beginners. It is about 28 minutes long and has been viewed over 1.9 million times.

There is an introductory video by Leila called How to Use Microsoft Power BI | Create Your First Dashboard Now (Practice Files included). It has over 700,000 views and is about 23 minutes long. At time 4:10 Leila transforms 3 columns of date values (month, day, year) into one column by merging and then changes the data type to date. At time 6:05 she shows us how to split one column into two columns where we have the city and province in one column like this: Toronto (Ontario). At time 6:40 Leila talks about the relationship between the two tables, The Customer table and the Invoice table. The lookup table is the Customer table and the fact table is the Invoice table.