In the second half of 2021, I have attended a one-day course for Power BI. The course provider is SMU Academy. Nonetheless, this is strictly not a sponsored post.
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence tool as its name suggests. It offers the creation of visualisations and dashboards through drag and drop options, in addition to access to other powerful Microsoft apps like Power Query in Power BI itself, similar to Excel. The Power BI interface will be familiar to frequent users of Microsoft products. The ribbon on the top of the page like Word, formulas, and PivotTable-like fields Excel and dragging around charts on the canvas as easy as PowerPoint (pictured below).
Here is a sample of a Power BI report done after class on my own:
Here are my thoughts after the introductory course and a day with Power BI Desktop free from Microsoft Store:
Things I like:
1. Data preparation and wrangling within Power BI: Power BI allows users to connect data within itself by visualising the connections akin to a database schema. It also allows users to create new tables within. These
2. The use of Excel formulas and familiar Excel functions makes it accessible: The familiar Excel formula makes it easy for Excel users to transition compared to other tools that may have their way of writing formulas and codes. Functions like Split and Fill also help users clean data with a few clicks. These offer a chance for users to pick up a new tool with a smoother learning curve. Nevertheless, the introduction of Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) which is PowerBI's query language is one more thing to learn.
3. Ease of use: Like Google Data Studio that I have reviewed previously, the creation of charts is easy by clicking, dragging, and dropping. It is similar to using Excel for dashboarding after PivotTable but on steroids. One chart that I like having this option the most is the KPI chart which users can drag and drop and a simple yet good looking KPI chart is done in less than a minute (pictured below). Similar to Tableau it offers drilling down and Buttons like Navigation.
First Impression: Better than expected as a tool, but the tool is limited due to the paywall for free users to make data visualisations accessible to all.