What is BI?

• BI = Business intelligence
• Business intelligence comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information
• BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations
• refers to the procedural and technical infrastructure that collects, stores, and analyzes the data produced by a company’s activities
• BI is a broad term that encompasses data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights

• Cloud based business analytics service by Microsoft
• Power BI is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization, or embed them in your app or website

Links

• https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/what-is-power-bi/
• https://www.tidestonesolutions.com/insights/blog/2016/power-bi-terminology/
• https://www.nigelfrank.com/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-microsoft-power-bi/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/end-user-glossary

Sample data for Power BI Desktop From Microsoft

• ContosoSalesForPowerBI
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/sample-datasets

Microsoft Power BI

• Power BI Desktop : companion desktop application for data modeling and creating visualizations, reports
• Power BI
  • Also known as Power BI Services or Power BI Online
  • Power BI Service is the full version of Power BI, and is hosted on Azure
  • Subscription based

Power BI features

• Combine a variety of data sources (from the cloud or databases or files) & use these to create data models
• Use data models to answer analytical questions
• Refine data models to enable easy exploration of the data
• Create dashboards that provide information at a glance from the data models that you build
• Build interactive reports with interrelated visualizations that help you understand your data more effectively
• Use Quick Insights to start exploring your data if you have no idea where to start
• View dashboards and reports from mobile devices using apps (Windows, iOS or Android)

Visualization

• Visualization is also called Visual
• A visual representation of your data such as a chart or graph or map
• A way to provide context and insight into your data at a quick glance, without having to decipher raw numbers or text in a table

Datasets

• A collection of data that Power Bi uses to create visuals
• Might be a combination of data imported from many different sources

Reports

A collection of visuals that appear together on one or more pages; visuals that are related to one another in some way

Dashboards

One location that displays a selected group of reports and visuals; usually fits on one single page of data often referred to as a “canvas”

Tiles

A single visual found in a report or dashboard

• A tile is a rendering of a visual that a designer pins
• Each pinned tile shows a visualization that a designer created from a dataset and pinned to that dashboard
• A tile can also contain an entire report page and can contain live streaming data or a video
• Dashboard tiles in Power BI

Workbooks

• Workbooks are a special type of dataset
• Power BI classifies an Excel workbook as a Dataset (import excel) and other times as a Workbook (connect excel)
• Workbooks => Excel Workbooks
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-basic-concepts#workbooks
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-excel-workbook-files

Power BI Designer

Who builds and shares dashboards and reports using “Power BI Desktop” (a stand-alone tool)

Power BI Consumer

A Power BI Consumer is who:

• reviews and interact with Power BI content (visualizations, reports, dashboards etc.) to make business decisions
• uses the Power BI service for analysis, monitoring, exploration, and decision making

Consumers receive Power BI content, like dashboards and reports, from colleagues. Consumers use the Power BI service, which is the website-based version of Power BI.