Power BI Training in Visakhapatnam

Power BI Can Do Many Things

Power BI has mobile apps

• One of the benefits of starting from scratch is you have no legacy to carry around.  Microsoft has built mobile apps for Apple and Android (and Windows mobile of course).
• Under the leadership of Satya Nadella Microsoft supports every platform and it no longer uses its brand strength in one product to try to force participation in another.  The iPhone and iPad apps are simply great.
• You can subscribe via eMail – but please don’t!
• Some of you just want your static report to appear in your email inbox every morning.  OK, Power BI can do that.  You just go to the report tab you want to see, click “subscribe via email” and a nicely formatted PDF that is ideal for printing will be there in your inbox when you get to work.  But please please think about using the mobile apps instead.   These are sooo much better and have full interactivity.  All you have to do is remember to open the app in the morning.  At worst, subscribe to a report via email and when you see it in your inbox, simply open the app instead :-).

Power BI can be embedded into your own custom apps

• Another benefit of building from the ground up is you can think about all sorts of issues when you design the architecture.  Microsoft has always planned to allow Power BI to be embedded into custom apps. 
• So if you want to build your own website and control user access via your own logon credentials, then that is fine with Microsoft.  Just embed Power BI into your application and away you go. 
• Same goes for mobile apps or anything else you can think of for that matter. 
• There is a dedicated licensing agreement specifically built for Power BI embedded that makes the product financially compelling.

Power BI is very cheap to buy

• Free to try and indeed free to use as long as you want. 
• If you want to take advantage of more of the enterprise features including controlled sharing of data, automatic refreshes using gateways etc.  then you have to pay – wait for it – a whole US$9.99 per month per user.  It is enough to make the competition shiver in their boots!
• Power BI Desktop is free to use on the desktop for ever, and free for any user in the cloud as long as they are not using the features mentioned above. 
• And frankly the professional features are hugely value adding so you really can see the benefits when you start to pass a small pile of pennies over to Microsoft. 
• And it is at least as good (if not better) than Excel is in the BI space already – and it is less than 2 years old as a product.  Do you think it will get better in the next 2 years?  You bet your life (or better still your position as a corporate decision maker) it will!

 Power BI is easy to use (and hence cheap to train users)

• Anyone that can click on a button can interact with a Power BI report. 
• It is intuitive and easy to learn for anyone that wants to consume the content interactively. 
• The training costs of this product are low making the total cost of ownership very compelling. 
• And that is before the product even gets used and helps users make decisions to drive business results.

Power BI has a modelling engine that power users can learn

• In addition Power BI is enabling self service BI to a new wave of “developers” from the business community with the Vertipaq engine.  No longer is this the sole domain of an MDX programmer to develop a cube that can be used.  
• There will still be a need for IT cube developers in many companies and of course they can now develop in Power BI, however competent Excel users can also now do the work too.  Power BI has a language called DAX (Data Analysis eXpressions).  
• This is a functional language that can be learnt by Excel professionalshence it doesn’t have to be the IT pros that do all the work now.  
• And as a bonus, the DAX language in Power BI is also available in Power Pivot for Excel, so Excel users get to learn a new super language that they can leverage in multiple places.

Power BI has data loading tools that power users can learn

• Power Query is so easy to use it is embarrassing to those skilled in SSIS.  We are not saying that we don’t need SSIS developers any more as there will always be a need for this technology for large scale enterprise BI projects. 
• But this is no longer the only robust Microsoft technology that is out there, and any capable Excel professional can learn and use Power Query.  
• Power Query has a user driven interface that generates code (in the M language) to transform the data.  
• The process steps are saved as a process and can be re-run over new data at any time.  
• As a bonus, Power Query is also identical in Excel so you get to learn another language once that can be used in multiple places.  Did we mention that Power Query is so much more than just a self service ETL tool.  If you use Excel and you don’t use Power Query, you are missing out on something special.

 Power BI is self service BI…

• For the 2 reasons above (Vertipaq engine and Power Query), Power BI is self service BI personified. 
• It is everything you want self service BI to be and more. 
• Any competent Excel user can learn and use these tools and hence they can become semi self sufficient in their analytics and reporting needs very quickly.

Except when its not self service BI

• But just because Power BI is a very capable self service BI tool, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be an enterprise strength BI tool too – in fact it can be both at the same time. 
• Power BI has the foundation of an enterprise strength tool and a self service capable tool all at once. 
• And don’t underestimate the value in having ad hoc analysis and enterprise analysis capability shared and using the same underlying technology – everyone benefits from this. 
• And what’s more we are fully expecting that in the future users will be able to extend deployed standardised enterprise Power BI reporting by creating user specific measures that allow additional add hoc analysis on top of the core (not here yet, but we can imagine it will come).

Power BI has consolidation dashboards

• Power BI is among other things a data source aggregator.
• It doesn’t matter where your data comes from or how/if it interacts with other data you care about.  If it is data and you can report on it, you can include it in Power BI and pin your visualisations to a dashboard/cockpit where you can see everything you care about and nothing you don’t.