#Microsoft365 – Power BI (Business Intelligence) supplies business with dashboards which display the metrics which are most important to them. It’s updated in real time (big frustration for old types of reports) and can be accessed on different devices.

For previous posts in my #Microsoft365Challenge go to the index page.

Imagine your car did not have a dashboard. No fuel indication, speed or warning signs. Not cool right? Now imagine you had to open the boot of your car to get to the Dot Matrix printer – then read through pages and pages of reports, to find the latest update on fuel usage.

Keep in mind – these would only have been updated last night at 12am so you’ll have to manually deduct all usage from what you think your car’s tank size is to work out how much fuel is left. Then also take into account the litres you’ve used since the last (Dot Matrix) report update.

Sounds absolutely crazy right? Well…. that’s how many companies “fly by the seat of their pants” without the necessary real time data to make informed decisions. 

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service that enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of data through easy-to-use dashboards, interactive reports, and compelling visualizations that bring data to life.  Read more…

Need to know:

  • Available for Desktop, Web and Mobile
  • E5 Office 365 Includes PowerBI
  • Can be bought standalone – Pro & Premium
  • Power BI is not available for on-premises
  • Below are the types of data sources you can connect to:
    • Data from Excel and Power BI Desktop files.
    • Content packs for services, with ready-made dashboards, reports, and datasets for services such as Salesforce. In addition to establishing a data connection, Power BI provides pre-built dashboards and reports for each of these services.
    • Connectors to databases and other datasets such as Azure SQL Databaseand SQL Server Analysis Services tabular data.
  • Power BI report web part for SharePoint Online was released to First Release tenants in February 2017

Here’s a short video clip to get you started:

Note:  The Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in PowerBI is pretty awesome. There’s various reports pre-setup for you to use:  Enable the Power BI Adoption content pack for Office 365

Resources:

Purpose of this blog challenge:

I will write 365 blogs in 365 days around Microsoft 365. I did a similar challenge with Office 365, blogs can be found here. I won’t just be talking about the new Microsoft 365 subscription model. I will be sharing any news, tips and tricks around Office / Office 365 / Windows / Mobility and Security. And let’s not forget all the great new Apps & services available.  A lot of what I’ll share on Office and SharePoint will also be applicable to none “Office 365” versions.

Feel free to #AskBraam if you have questions or would like me to write about a specific topic. I’ve created a Flow to monitor Twitter for the #AskBraam hashtag and will try my best to incorporate any questions into the blogs, or answer them directly on Twitter. This is a “Learning through Sharing” approach to teach my pet sheep about Microsoft – read more on this here.