How to Effectively Learn and Apply Power BI in Your Business
As of today, Power BI is one of the most popular and utilized data tools. At least 50,000 businesses rely on Power BI to help them clean, model, visualize and transform their data.
Do you know why Power BI has grown in acceptance and utilization? That’s because businesses have realized that Microsoft’s Power BI is too powerful to be deployed for just data visualization.
The beauty of Power BI is not just a business intelligence tool but how it is designed to be quickly learned, understood, and applied by people who have yet to gain data analytics knowledge.
In this piece, we’ll be dwelling on how you can pick up Power BI skills and deploy it for the benefit of your business. Essentially, while we cannot scratch beyond the surface, this article will bring you adept with the functioning of Power BI as a business owner.
Note this, regardless of the size of your business; there’s a lot Power BI can do to help put your venture on the right track.
How To Effectively Learn Power BI
There’s no shortcut on how to learn Power BI, especially as a business owner with little time on your hands. Since you might not be taking the PL-300 exam, here’s our tip on effectively learning Power BI;
- Acquaint Yourself with The Interface
That’s exactly where to pick things from, installing power BI on your everyday PC and getting used to it. You should know that Power BI is free to download and only runs on Windows.
However, don’t get stuck at the interface for too long; you should prepare to get your hands dirty with data.
- Develop Some Visualizations
Once you know how the interface works, your next stop will be to develop visualizations in the Report View using clean data from your business.
This is to give you a clue as to how to import data and create reports using the same.
- Learning How to Model and Clean Data
Next, after mastering visualizations, would be to advance to modeling and cleaning data. This range from building data models, cleaning data using the Power Query editor, and calculating values with DAX.
Of course, this is complex knowledge, but not impossible if you have the will.
- Publish Your Reports
It’s not enough to be able to visualize, model, and clean data; you need to be able to publish it in the form of a report. The whole essence of knowing Power BI is being able to share it with your team to be able to make the best business decisions.
How To Apply Power BI Skills in Your Business
The whole essence of learning Power BI is to be able to deploy it for the benefit of your business.
- Provide You With Real-Time Information About Your Business
Imagine being in the know as to the health of your business. With data streaming in, your dashboard is updated, and your visuals are updated.
Armed with this real-time information, you are able to solve problems quickly. More importantly, you are able to identify opportunities for your business and maximize it.
- Allows You To Build Personalized Reports
You run a unique business. Therefore, you need to be able to customize your own metrics and reports. Power BI’s dashboard will allow you to customize dashboards per your business needs.
With ease, you can develop intuitive models and visualizations. Imagine being able to generate custom reports regarding an aspect of your business.
- Take Advantage of AI Tools
We are in the age of artificial intelligence, and the impact of AI on your business is limitless. With Power BI, you don’t have to be a data scientist before you can get insights from structured or unstructured data.
With the combined efforts of Power BI and AI tools, you can take your business to the next level with unparalleled intelligence.
- Swift Collaboration and Report Sharing
There’s a reason why Power BI is regarded as the industry’s leading Business Intelligence tool for close to two decades. It’s all about how it can help you drive better decisions across every business stratum.
Power BI allows you to be able to share and collaborate with every member of your team for on-the-spot decision-making.
Final Thoughts
The best approach to succeeding in your quest to master Power BI as a business owner will be to have a learning schedule and be systematic. If you allow it to come to you at once, you’ll likely give up before you know your way around the tool.
To understand the basics of Power BI, you may spend about 4 weeks and another 8 weeks to master basic DAX, edit queries, and transformation editor. As for publishing a report, it may require about 3 months.
However, there’s no mountain that cannot be climbed if you take it slow and steady.