Features of PowerBI

[EvelynRichardson]

So I've read an article that we should shift reporting from Excel to PowerBI. According to it, "Power BI offers more powerful analytics and reporting features than an Excel". It's so impressive that I would want to use PowerBI on my own MIS. Anyone here who have tried to use PowerBI? And how did you learn to use it? Thank you for those who will answer.

[bfelton]

Which MIS are you using?

[danbuntu]

We're using PowerBI and it's awesome.

It's very easy to hook to different datasources and you can create some very nice looking and drillable dashboards with it.

There are lots of resources out there teaching you how to use it. Personally I realy like the videos by guy in a cube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFp1vaKzpfvoGai0vE5VJ0w

[SpreadsheetJockey]

I've recently been mucking about with PowerBI and it's great fun. It's easy enough to pick up the basics with just some googlefu. It can pull together some useful visuals easily, but I feel like I'm going to be picking up bits of its related languages as I go along, when it comes to things like cumulative totals (I think people will be cobbling things together in the same manner that many of us accidentally acquired VBA skills). I do think its going to be increasingly popular in the near future (if not a complete excel replacement), as its a recognisably Microsoft Office-ish looking product that is palatable to schools. I've definitely begun thinking of it as a future essential employment skill for people in school data roles.

[elJukes]

We are starting to use Power BI for various analysis, from attendance to behaviour and assessment. I found a lot of resources online, including the PBI community of the Microsoft site, to be quite helpful. In terms of setting up a data model I got a copy of the Kimball Group's data warehousing book, which goes through Dimensional data structures.

 

We use Bromcom as our MIS which has a Power BI viewer embedded into it so we can publish reports to staff through the MIS. The report refreshes itself once every hour from data in Bromcom so people get quick access to analysis.

 

One of the languages Power BI uses is called DAX and is very similar to Excel formulae. You can even use DAX in Excel through Power Pivot.

 

There's lots of advantages to using Power BI, once you've set up a report the system can deal with extracting the data from your source, cleaning it and presenting it. It is by no means the end of Excel, ad hoc analysis and quick figure production are generally a lot quicker in a spreadsheet rather than setting up a dimensional table model.

 

Our aim is to leverage the two. Power BI to provide a set of standardised reports that are self-sustaining, to provide quick and on demand analytics to the masses. This frees up time for me to focus more on data quality, turning analytics into insight and exploring other avenues of interest.

[nicholab]

How would I take a CSV of staff hours work and then match them into PowerBI? As the CSV changes with Staff turn over. I would then like to compare their hours with a base line for each member of staff so that people that are taking it too far could be picked up? To me this is starting to sound like big brother.

[bfelton]

How would I take a CSV of staff hours work and then match them into PowerBI? As the CSV changes with Staff turn over. I would then like to compare their hours with a base line for each member of staff so that people that are taking it too far could be picked up? To me this is starting to sound like big brother.

 

If you are using SIMS the third party reporting IDs are great for matching records across reports.

[matt40k]

I'm planning on running a few webinars (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/204810-powerbi.html) looking at PowerBI for schools and it'll be great to get a ton problems like @nicholab. Plan is to do a intro session then drill into areas as PowerBI is a quite a massive tool - you've got the technical side - permissions, security, how it actually works, the data modelling side - like @elJukes has pointed at the Kimball, the calculations (DAX), the ETL - getting the data and transforming it (PowerQuery), the visuals (based on D3.js )

 

 

PS: PowerBI won't ever replace Excel.

[Bromcom-PR]

PS: PowerBI won't ever replace Excel.

 

Hi @matt40k,

 

Where we are finding PowerBI winning over Excel hand down is in deployment across MATs (large or small). Many large MATs found Excel based Analytics very difficult to manage. Despite instant export facility into Excel, ensuring integrity across the MATs was a huge challenge. With Power BI, as @elJukes has pointed above "as our MIS which has a Power BI viewer embedded into it so we can publish reports to staff through the MIS. The report refreshes itself once every hour" - PowerBI is controlled centrally and hence securing a single point of truth across the MAT.

 

Other benefits are well known - data visualisation, drill down and ease of use etc...

Edited April 12, 2019 by Bromcom-PR

[matt40k]

100% - This is what PowerBI was designed for! It's a great analytics \ presentation tool. Folks like finance people will still export to Excel and do magic in Excel - doesn't stop them from using PowerBI however. It's a question of using the right tool for the job. Excel is an excellent simple database, PowerBI can be used as a database, but it's data entry is terrible, but that's not what its designed to do - they much prefer you use Excel then connect PowerBI to it.

 

The whole Excel vs PowerBI connecting to multiple data sets is a mute point. They both use PowerQuery! It's just PowerBI has better real world implementation as it doesn't support all those Excel hacks from yester year

 

 

(Should also add its great companies are using enterprise grade tools rather then trying to build their own)

Edited April 12, 2019 by matt40k