6 key benefits of using Power BI

Data is everywhere. The world contains an extraordinary amount of data, an amount that grows larger and larger each day. This vast collection of information has changed the way the world interacts, revealed new ways to understand trends in business and in our daily lives. With the increasing availability of data comes new challenges and opportunities as business look to gain important insights and transform information into actionable and meaningful results.

As data becomes more accessible, manipulating vast amounts of available data to drive insights and make business decisions can be a challenge. Business leaders at every level need to become competent in reading data and be able to understand data and analytical concepts that may have previously seemed impossible, including statistical methods, machine learning, and data manipulation. With this spread of data literacy comes the powerful ability to make more informed business decisions that rely on the intelligent use of data, rather than on an individual’s opinions. In the past, these tasks were extremely complex and would be handed off to engineers. With the tools that exist today, business leaders are able to dive into their own analytics and uncover powerful insights.

If you’re currently on the market for self-service data analytics, it’s likely you’ve already come across Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is a solution that allows organisations to visualise their data for analysis, spot trends and patterns while obtain actionable insights to make better business decisions.

In this blog, we will explore 6 key benefits of using Power BI for reports and analytics.

Allow for unparalleled Excel Integration
Many businesses still rely heavily on Excel for their analytics and reporting efforts. Power BI integrates seamlessly with Excel, allowing you to connect Excel queries, data models, and reports to Power BI dashboards. This helps you quickly gather and share Excel business data in new ways. Plus, create interactive visualisations without needing to learn a new application or language.

Access to Refreshing Real-Time Data
Learn what’s happening right now in your business, not just in the past. Gain access to real-time analytics to help your team solve issues quickly, identify opportunities and handle time-sensitive situations more efficiently.

Refresh your data up to eight times a day with Power Pro and up to 48 times a day with Power BI Premium. As data is pushed in, your dashboards will update in real-time and display the new information. Power BI’s data cache allows for simple and speedy report deployment. Data can also be refreshed at set times that meet the business’ needs, all in one application.

Easily Build Personalised Dashboards
Dashboards can be customised to fit your company’s requirements with intuitive and interactive visualisations. Plus, the drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy for your staff to generate custom Power BI reports quickly.

Simply select and open the information that’s most important to you by drilling down into data visualisations. This helps you gain a better understanding of what’s going on inside your organisation. Plus, avoid the need to learn complex query language with Power BI’s use of natural language queries.

Wide range of connectivity
Power BI allows you to import a wide range of data sources such as the sales data recorded in CRM or financial data from ERP. The platform seamlessly integrates with all Microsoft products like Azure, Dynamics 365, Excel, and so on. It also offers data connectivity with third-party solutions such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Spark. Connect data files (like XML and JSON) and SQL server databases to help you create new and compelling datasets from multiple sources for your analysis and reports.

Affordable for any Organisation
Power BI is competitively priced compared to similar business intelligence and analytics tools. The platform offers different versions so you can choose the one best suited to your business. For example, you can get Power BI Pro with all the functionality in the Azure cloud or Power BI Premium for enterprise-scale analytics. There is also Power BI Desktop, a free downloadable version that you can use to make reports and dashboards on your desktop.

Regular Monthly Updates
Another standout feature of Power BI is that there are regular monthly updates to the platform. Microsoft frequently respond to suggestions from the Power BI community and new feature releases are based on user feedback.

Recognised by Gartner for the 14th consecutive year as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Power BI can help you make better-informed decisions across your organisation. Contact our solutions experts to see how to optimise your operations with Data Analytics and Power BI.