All businesses are running with the help of data in the form of emails, printouts, reports, excel sheets, etc. As the business grows, the data also gets accumulated and reaches a certain level where it is nearly impossible to find the data you need. In fact, when you have a huge amount of data, it is possible that you might miss the latest information and using the old information.

Power BI is one such tool that helps you in getting your job done in an easy and efficient manner by transforming the data in the form of charts, reports, graphs, and other visualization techniques. This will make your data more meaningful and easy to understand with a few clicks. Data insights can be viewed using intuitive and colorful visual designs instead of using old tables, lists, and bullets.

Power BI allows you and your co-workers to work simultaneously on the reports and dashboards using a web browser or smartphone. All the data gets refreshed and synced automatically, which means you are always working on the latest data. Thus, no need to worry about the manual revisions or asking your co-workers to maintain the tracker for changes. Power BI performs all these tasks for you on its own.

Since the data is now dynamic in nature, you are free to check your data in an advanced manner for insights, trends, and BI functions. Power BI is such a powerful tool that you can slice the content on your own and also ask personalized questions using your own language. All this information is available 24/7 anytime, anywhere. You will receive alerts from Power BI once the data is changed from the threshold value set by you.

Your job role in the organization decides how you will be interacting with Power BI. You can be a user or a manager. As a manager or a client, you will be the one who will be receiving all the reports, dashboards, and other visualizations to review them. You will then interact with the stakeholders to make important business decisions for the growth of the organization. You might also be using the online Power BI service from your device. For this role, you don’t need to be a data scientist, as you will not be processing and analyzing the complex data. Power BI will do all that work, and it will provide you straightforward results.

The second role is of the developer or designer. If you are a developer or the designer, then you will be using Power BI extensively to deal with the huge amount of data. You will create business reports, use Power BI services, create intuitive templates & designs, collaborate data with your co-workers, and more. This is an essential role as it plays an important part in using Power BI in an advanced manner. You will be using Power BI differently for different projects because the requirements are different for every project.

It is a collection of services, mobile apps, web apps, connectors, and cloud-based framework working together that combines unrelated data into visually appealing insights. You can easily connect your data, whether it is an Excel sheet or cloud-based, in a very easy manner and then share it with your colleagues.

Power BI is very fast and can create insights using any database. It is robust in nature and works in real-time analytics. It can be customized as per the needs and requirements to suit the client's needs.

Now coming to the Power BI elements, there are mainly three elements:

1. Desktop
2. Service
3. Mobile apps.

You can easily download Power BI Desktop using the below link.

To sign in to the Power BI service, you need to create an online account first. You can do it by using your email address.

To learn the advanced realms of Power BI, there is a common flow of activities to be followed. They are:

1. Submit the data in the Power BI Desktop. Then create the required report.
2. Publish the report to Service. After doing so, you will be able to create dashboards and visualizations as per your requirements.
3. Now collaborate the newly created dashboards with other team members to review, and they can also modify it simultaneously.
4. Check the shared dashboards as well as custom reports for interactions within the Mobile apps.

Now in the next chapter, we will see about the building blocks present in Power BI, which help create appealing visuals and reports from your data.