Power BI is a comprehensive business analytics solution developed by Microsoft that empowers organizations to harness the power of their data. It enables users to connect to diverse data sources, transform and model data, and create visually compelling reports and dashboards. With its intuitive interface and robust features, Power BI empowers users to explore data, uncover insights, and make informed decisions.
Power BI is a versatile tool that can be applied across various industries and departments. It is used to track key performance indicators (KPIs), analyze sales trends, monitor operational efficiency, and forecast future outcomes. By providing a unified platform for data analysis and visualization, Power BI helps organizations improve decision-making, optimize operations, and drive growth.
So, what do you do when you want to convert unstructured data into comprehensible, practical information that can be used to derive insights or make business decisions? Power BI would be your go-to tool for visualizing and analyzing data for this purpose.
Creating Dashboards in Power BI
When setting out to make dashboards, the first step should always be to think about the audience for the dashboard and what is the purpose of making the dashboard. Some great questions to ask would be – how would the audience use the dashboard, what would be the key metrics that would help the audience make informed decisions, and what information should be provided to the audience to help achieve success?
A dashboard must be a one-glance or a one-screen summary of all the essential information. To offer this, it relies on semantic models and reports. And, to ensure that the dashboard has all the accurate models and reports supplying the necessary information, the right data sources must be picked.
Picking the Right Data Sources
Power BI can support a wide range of data sources. The quality and source of data used to make the dashboard will influence the quality and utility of the dashboard. The data you intend to use should be clean, accurate, and current, irrespective of the source – databases, social media, cloud storage, or spreadsheets.
Consider using Power Query to clean and convert the data. Different data connectors can be used to improve the data. Low-quality data would lead to errors and an ineffective dashboard, so such a situation must be avoided.
Once you have picked the correct, accurate data source, how do you ensure that the dashboard you are making is useful? A simple way to do this is to make it visually appealing and effective. For that, we use data visualization techniques.
Using Effective Data Visualization
There are multiple options for data visualization – maps, bar graphs, line graphs, scatter plots, pie charts, etc. Picking the right one to serve the purpose of your dashboard is crucial. For instance, a bar graph is useful when evaluating changes that have taken place over time or when comparisons need to be done. Line graphs can help chart out trends over time like an increase or decrease or seasonal changes in specific parameters. Pie charts are best used when there are few parameters and all of them add up to make a whole, a pie chart with many segments can be tacky and difficult to read. When dealing with geographical data, maps would be a good option to consider.
So, pick a visualization that works for both the type and volume of data at hand as well as the requirement & utility of the dashboard.
Another important aspect of dashboards is that they are specific and can be read on one screen with preferably no scrolling. So, it should be capable of showcasing data filtered by different parameters, which would also make it more effective.
Filtering and Slicing the Data
For real-time dashboard interaction and effective exploratory data analysis, the dashboard should offer users the capability to filter the data, as needed. This way, users can view specific subsets of data. So, say one wants to see data for a specific time, product category, season, team, area, store, etc. they can select the appropriate filters and view everything on the dashboard itself. This would make the dashboard more flexible and increase its utility value as well.
In the process, ensure that the dashboard doesn’t get too complicated.
Keep it Simple, Always
Dashboards must be simple but highly valuable. The fundamental purpose of every dashboard is to share useful & relevant information in the most comprehensible and easy way possible. If the dashboards go overboard and overload the user with information, users will start avoiding the dashboard, choosing to go the longer route of pulling multiple reports, analyzing them, and getting the information needed, thereby defeating the purpose of the dashboard. So, pick the most important KPIs and build a dashboard that can be everyone’s go-to tool providing whatever they need most simply and quickly.
These are just some of the steps one can take to make effective and smart dashboards in Power BI. Power BI offers many useful tools and tips to ensure that your dashboards shine. It is one of the best data visualization tools in the market and every enterprise must use it to simplify their data analysis and decision-making.
Get started on your journey to make the dashboards by learning to work with Power BI today!
Get Certified with Cognixia’s Power BI Online Training
Cognixia’s Analyzing Data with Power BI training course will introduce you to the principles of data analysis. It provides users with data warehousing tools to help organize data, data exploration, and interactive dashboards.
Power BI is now one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing business intelligence clouds. Microsoft was named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for analytics and business intelligence solutions for the 14th year in a row.
Cognixia’s Power BI certification course looks at the many methodologies and best practices for modeling, analyzing, and visualizing data using Power BI that follow business and technical needs.
This online Power BI training and certification course covers:
- How to ingest, clean, and transform data
- Modeling data for performance & scalability
- Designing and creating reports for data analysis
- Applying and performing advanced report analytics
- Managing and sharing report assets
- Creating paginated reports in Power BI
The Power BI course is highly recommended for data analysts, BI developers, SQL developers, technology engineers, application architects, software engineers, data visualizers, data translators, application designers, and software development specialists. Power BI is also a very useful tool outside the IT functions and has great business value in non-IT functions.
