Power BI

About this Course

Power BI is an interactive data visualization software product developed by Microsoft with a primary focus on business intelligence. It is part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Data may be input by reading directly from a database, webpage, or structured files such as spreadsheets, CSV, XML, and JSON.

Power BI consists of several elements that all work together, starting with these three basics:

1. Power BI Desktop: This is a Windows desktop application that is used for creating reports. It provides data modeling capabilities, allowing users to connect to and transform data from various sources, and create complex data models.
2. Power BI Service: This is an online service (sometimes referred to as Power BI online) where Power BI reports are published and can be shared. It also offers additional features such as dashboards, dataflows, workspaces, and sharing & collaboration features.
3. Power BI Mobile: This is a mobile application for viewing and interacting with Power BI reports and dashboards.

Power BI supports a wide range of data sources, from Excel spreadsheets, on-premise SQL Server databases, to cloud services like Azure SQL Database, and other services such as Salesforce.

One of the main advantages of Power BI is its integration with other Microsoft products, like Excel, Azure, and SQL Server, as well as its ability to connect to many other third-party data sources. As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, Power BI has been a popular choice among businesses for its data visualization capabilities.