From the course: Power BI Essential Training

Overview: Power BI concepts - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Essential Training

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Overview: Power BI concepts

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- [Instructor] Business intelligence is about connecting business decisions to facts about the business and its environment, to take a deep dive and understand the data underneath your business and its processes. We start with getting data from one or more sources to create a semantic model. And if we have multiple sources of data, our model will also need to describe the relationships between those data sources. Using the Semantic model, we will create visualizations, charts, tables, and so on that we can share with our colleagues. With all of this information summarized and illustrated in a way that is useful and accessible, our team or department or organization will be able to make better business decisions. Until recently, business intelligence was big business, what is called Enterprise BI, and the players were big organizations, SAP and Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and so on. Large companies creating large, expensive tools. And Enterprise BI was the realm of the IT professional more than any other group. IT folks and IT resources were invested to interview the business and to analyze the needs of end users so that IT could retrieve exactly the correct data and create the reports that end users and business managers were requesting. So this was a major investment and often iterative. We'd ask the business, create a report, get feedback, create a revised report, and so on. The first solid alternative to this type of business intelligence was Microsoft Excel. Because Excel allowed users to analyze data for themselves, even if they had to get the data from IT, even if the best they could get was last month's downloaded data. For many of us, Excel was our first step into self-service business intelligence, and the very first version of Power BI was built almost totally in Excel and with Excel add-ins, but Microsoft continued to invest in Power BI. So now Power BI is a world class set of business data analysis tools. Power BI is an end-to-end data analysis solution, and by that I mean it's really all you need. First, we'll use Power BI to get data, and then we will use Power BI to create a semantic model with that data. We'll use our model to create reports. And don't simply think of rows and rows of figures with labels. Reports in Power BI are filled with charts, geospatial maps, dozens of types of visualizations. We can share those reports or we can reuse visualizations from one or more reports to create shareable dashboards. Power BI includes a number of tools, and we will not focus on all of them in this course. First, we will work with the Power BI service, also called powerbi.com, or what most people mean when they say Power BI. It's web based, and for many users, this is the only tool they use. If you are a Power BI end user, it's possible that all of your Power BI time might be spent in a browser in the Power BI service. But if you are a business analyst or a power user, then you should also look at Power BI Desktop, a free download that installs on your Windows computer. Power BI Desktop is used to build and modify semantic models, and it's also used to create reports. There are mobile apps for Power BI, for iOS and Android, and there are other components in the Power BI ecosystem, including a visuals marketplace where you can download custom visuals. A Power BI gateway used to synchronize data, a Power BI Report Server that is used in place of the Power BI service for companies that don't have their data stored in the cloud, and also development tools specifically for Power BI. Let's continue, and we will begin by working with the Power BI Service.

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