Why Learn Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence platform for data aggregation, analysis, and visualization. This popular tool allows users to unearth patterns in data and share their findings with their organization. Have you ever explored all of the things Power BI can do? This versatile tool has applications across career paths and industries, such as marketing, retail management, and finance. Knowledge of Power BI is an essential skill for anyone tasked with forecasting, decision-making, or monitoring trends of customers or employees. 

Here, you’ll learn more about the types of careers that benefit from Power BI and how it can enhance your professional life. Regardless of your overall goals, learning Power BI is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume. 

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a group of BI (business intelligence) services and products that converts data from various sources into reports, visualizations, and interactive dashboards. This allows users to share data insights with others who work at their organization or to embed them onto a website or application. Power BI offers effective business solutions with each of its individual elements and provides users with even more capabilities when these components work together.

One of the main benefits of working with Power BI is that it can integrate with other Microsoft services and products and third-party platforms. Users can connect Power BI to Excel, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange, among others. Whether your data is stored in an on-premises data warehouse, a cloud-based warehouse, or an Excel spreadsheet, Power BI can easily connect to these data sources, provide visualizations based on the data they contain, and offer insights that you can then share with other stakeholders. There are several Power BI products, each of which has different uses; Power BI Desktop creates reports, Power BI Services publishes the reports, and the Power BI mobile app provides users with a way to view each dashboard or report.

Read more about what Power BI is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Power BI?

Power BI is a valuable tool for illustrating what’s happening within an organization in the present. It also has applications for helping to anticipate what may transpire in the future. Because it relies on machine learning capabilities, Power BI can locate patterns in data, then draw from these patterns to predict various “what-if” scenarios. Based on these predictions, Power BI users can create forecasts and work to prepare for different demand patterns that may emerge. They can then communicate this information through data visualizations, which impart key data findings to stakeholders to make more educated business predictions.

Power BI is a go-to for those who work with data because it can be used to input huge stores of data that would be a struggle for other platforms to process. Because this intelligence suite is cloud-based, it provides users with regularly updated algorithms and intelligence capabilities. Those who use Power BI can personalize their experience by creating dashboards that allow them to quickly and easily access necessary data. In addition, it’s possible to create alerts in Power BI, which provide users with up-to-date measurements. Best of all, because this platform can integrate with other business management tools, such as Office 365, SharePoint, SAP, Google Analytics, and Hadoop, it remains a hugely popular tool for those working with data across platforms. 

Common Professional Uses for Power BI

The various applications for Power BI span professions and industries. This tool’s accessible interface and flexibility make it valuable for small-scale use, such as for employees to use for data reporting. In addition, companies can also elect to use this business solution on a larger scale, such as by hiring Microsoft Power BI partners or BI experts who assist Engineers in optimizing the benefits of various Power BI solutions.

In the retail sector, Power BI is useful for streamlining data management processes and helping retailers more effectively analyze data points to unearth actionable insights into customer purchasing patterns. This tool also has applications for consolidating data so companies can use it to help streamline supply chain operations. In the agricultural sector, Power BI draws from predictive analytics to provide forecasting insights, such as weather forecasts, wind direction, and temperature. This information helps inform decisions about irrigation or crop protection.

Those working in the banking sector also rely on Power BI to keep track of business performance and customer needs. When Power BI is used to manage workflows, banks and financial institutions better understand their customers, monitor profits and losses, focus on innovative digital opportunities, and even integrate various services and applications. Power BI is also used in the manufacturing sector to help businesses improve customer engagement and the efficiency of production sites. This tool also helps those working in manufacturing to reduce the frequency of information bottlenecks, predict hardware issues, reduce product disruptions or downtime, and make more informed business decisions.

Why Learn Power BI?

The following are just a few of the reasons learning Power BI can be a professional asset regardless of your industry focus:

Power BI Makes it Easy to Connect to Data

Consolidating data into a single location is a breeze, thanks to Power BI’s capacity to support over 70 connectors. This allows businesses to load data from an array of cloud-based sources, such as Google Analytics, Azure, Excel, and SalesForce. Power BI users can also load pre-built dashboards in mere seconds and perform advanced analytics in just minutes, thanks to this tool’s built-in connections. Best of all, the drag-and-drop interface makes it simple to combine different files and then analyze the data they contain in a single report.

It Offers Open-Source and Custom Visuals

For those who regularly present data findings in the form of interactive visualizations, Power BI has many features to help customize your experience. Not only does this tool provide pre-packaged data graphics for reports, such as pie charts, maps, and tables, but each of these can be customized so that it fits into a presentation. Power BI users can also work with free custom graphics offered by developers to showcase their data in the most effective and engaging way. Users can choose from many complex graph types, such as correlation plots, sparklines, and decision trees. Those using Power BI can also elect to create their own visualizations rather than rely on standard options.

Power BI Has Impressive Data Modeling Capabilities

Power BI is a powerful forecasting tool that can deliver reliable predictive analytics about potential future outcomes. When a Power BI user adds a prediction to a line chart, it’s possible to run and analyze different “what-if” scenarios on the data, like potential growth markets or financial outcomes. This tool can automatically detect seasonability when it offers forecasting results. This means it can apply statistical algorithms to estimate probable solutions based on past data, then transform them into data visualizations.

It Can Unify Vast Datasets into a Single Dashboard

Power BI is an adaptive tool that helps those who work exclusively with different types of data consolidate it so that it can be accessible to others within the organization. With the help of this product’s free add-ons, it has the capability of designing data visualizations that even those from a non-technical background can quickly engage with and understand. Power BI’s Infographic Designer has applications for creating stunning pictograms and can convert complex data into a more digestible format. Additionally, Power KPI showcases indicators and relevant data in a straightforward style that can be customized as needed. 

How to Start Learning Power BI

One of the most effective and interactive ways to learn Power BI is by enrolling in an in-person or live online course. Live online Power BI classes, as well as Power BI classes in-person are currently offered by top educational providers. Courses are available for those new to Power BI, as well as intermediate and advanced learners interested in mastering more complex topics, such as Microsoft Power Query and DAX functions. In addition to courses that specifically focus on Power BI, instruction options are available in classes that include Microsoft Excel, data analytics, and data visualization, among others. You can also search through a complete listing of live online and in-person Power BI classes for a breakdown of each Power BI course's price, length, and learning format.

If you aren’t quite ready to commit to a class that meets at regularly scheduled times, another learning option to consider is self-paced Power BI courses. Asynchronous study allows learners to begin learning Power BI with the help of pre-recorded videos, pre-loaded tutorials, and instructional content. These classes allow learners to balance learning around other life commitments, such as family or work. You can pause videos or watch them multiple times when studying asynchronously, which can help you balance studying Power BI with other personal or professional commitments.

Another way to learn more about how to work with big data is to watch Noble Desktop’s Getting Started in Python: Data Science free webinar. This 80-minute video covers many relevant data science topics, such as how to use data science in the business sector, which have applications for those interested in pursuing business intelligence. You can also learn more about Power BI by visiting Noble’s Data Analytics Blog & Learning Resources page, which has over 150 articles on relevant data topics, such as how to use Power BI, working with Tableau, and the various types of data analytics.

Read the full guide on how to learn Power BI. 

Learn Power BI with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Power BI Bootcamp is an excellent option if you want to learn more about using Power BI. This project-based course prepares students to use Power Query for data querying, Power BI’s data model for connecting to datasets, and its report view for designing interactive data visualizations and dashboards. Students work with different case studies to learn how to work with various Power BI capabilities and this tool’s DAX language for creating visualizations based on their data. All students have the option of a free retake for up to one year to revisit the material and gain additional practice.

Another excellent learning option for individuals who are interested in working with Power BI is Noble Desktop’s Data Analytics Certificate. This intensive course is offered in the in-person and live online format and provides participants with hands-on instruction with core data analytics and business intelligence tools and programs. Those enrolled complete real-world projects using Microsoft Excel, Python, SQL, and Tableau and have the option of also taking the Power BI Bootcamp free of charge. All students receive instruction from an expert instructor and one-on-one mentoring.

Key Insights

• Those who work with Power BI cite many professional benefits, such as its ability to connect to data, impressive data modeling and visualization capabilities, and the ability to unify different datasets into a singular dashboard.
• Several effective study options are available for those interested in learning Power BI, such as in-person coursework, live online classes, and self-paced tutorials.
• Regardless of why you learn Power BI, this tool has applications in many industries and fields, from finance to retail management. 
• You can receive comprehensive Power BI training by enrolling in one of Noble Desktop’s live online or in-person courses.