First things first, Microsoft 365 is a subscription service that offers you Office 2019 desktop apps (including the usual workhorses of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that many users have grown to love over the years), amongst other components. What does that mean? For the business user, it means that it can be rendered to you from the Cloud and available to you no matter your location as long as you have access to a browser.

Power BI comes in many parts consisting of several elements that work together, starting with these three basics:

• • • A Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop.
    • An online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service.
    • Power BI mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices.

Microsoft has designed these three basic elements -—Power BI Desktop, Power BI service, and Power BI mobile apps—to let you create, share, and consume business insights in the way that serves you and your role most effectively, whether you are a business user (end user), report creator, enterprise report creator, administrator, and a Power BI developer.

Beyond those three, Power BI also has other components/ features – Power BI Report Builder (for creating paginated reports in Power BI Service), Power BI Report Server (for hosting paginated reports), and Power BI Data Gateway (which act as the bridge between the Power BI service and your on-premises data sources)

In this article, we shall focus on the three basic elements of Power BI, starting with Power BI Desktop.

1.2 Getting Started with Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is a free application from Microsoft that you can install on your local computer that lets you connect to, transform, and visualize your data. 

With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple different sources of data, and combine them (often called modelling) into a data model. Power BI Desktop is available only on Windows, but Mac users have the options to run Windows apps and so can run it in Windows emulation mode or configure dual boot on their system.

Figure 1 below shows a typical Power BI design environment depicting the essential parts that any report creator should get familiar with to be productive in creating reports using the Power BI Desktop.

There are two main categories of Microsoft 365 – home (family or personal) and business (basic, app for business, standard, or premium). We shall now examine each version in turn, although our main focus in this blog would be on the business version.

Figure 1: Power BI Desktop with five commonly used areas that correspond to the main modelling steps

Figure 1 depicts the five common modelling steps that you can adopt for creating reports on Power BI Desktop:

1. 1. 1. • Get data
         • Transform data
         • Explore and refine data
         • Create relationships
         • Visualise data

We shall now examine the various roles that Power BI users can assume to enhance your understanding on how to adopt the product in your company.

We shall now examine the various roles that Power BI users can assume to enhance your understanding on how to adopt the product in your company.

Why should all your business users be comfortable with producing simple Power BI reports and dashboards? Because if they came to you without knowing how to use Microsoft Word 5 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have hired them.

So, why should you put up with them not being able to use Power BI today to produce reports that was expected of to be produced by BI developers 10 years ago, but now common place with the ease and simplicity of Power BI?

A business user can create reports easily on the Power BI service with little or not training by watching a 5-minues videos, many of which are available on Microsoft’s Power BI website.

2. Power BI for Business Users

Why should all your business users be comfortable with producing simple Power BI reports and dashboards? Because if they came to you without knowing how to use Microsoft Word 5 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have hired them.

So, why should you put up with them not being able to use Power BI today to produce reports that was expected of to be produced by BI developers 10 years ago, but now common place with the ease and simplicity of Power BI?
A business user can create reports easily on the Power BI service with little or not training by watching a 5-minues videos, many of which are available on Microsoft’s Power BI website.

2.1 Navigating the Power BI Service

To navigate and use the Power Bi service is quite straightforward as the Figure below shows:

Figure 2: Power BI Service homepage where you can get data and create new reports

2.2 Decision-making using Dashboard

How can you become a data-driven decision-making organisation? We discuss how in this section.
A typical sales dashboard might look like this:

Figure 3: A typical dashboard published in Power BI Service

With a typical sales dashboard as depicted above in Figure 3, managers can make decision about progress in sales and advertising campaigns success in a flash.

Why should you subscribe to the Enterprise edition of Power BI? We explain why having a Power BI Premium subscription would help you to be a truly data-driven decision-making organisation and the benefits that this would bring to you.

According to Microsoft, with Power BI Premium, you can access features and capabilities only available in Premium and offer greater scale and performance for Power BI content in your organization. Power BI Premium would allow more users in your organization to get the most out of Power BI with better performance and responsiveness. For example, with Power BI Premium, you and your organization’s users get the following capabilities:

• • Greater scale and performance for your Power BI reports
  • Flexibility to license by capacity
  • Best-in-class features for data visualization and insight-extraction such as AI-driven analysis, composable and reusable dataflows, and paginated reports
  • Unify self-service and enterprise BI with a variety of Premium-only capabilities that support heavier workloads and require enterprise scale
  • Built-in license to extend on-premises BI with Power BI Report Server
  • Support for data residency by region (Multi-Geo) and customer-managed encryption keys for data at rest (BYOK)
  • Ability to share Power BI content with anyone (even outside your organization) without purchasing a per-user license

So, whichever part of Power BI you choose to start with (we recommend starting with the desktop), you would find Power BI a revelation to aid your decision-making process. Good luck with trying it out and as detailed in the next section, Agile SharePoint can assist in that process.

To get the real benefits of data-driven decision-making using Power BI, we believe that training is key, both for your business users and your developers. So, to make Power BI work for you and turn your organisation into a truly data-driven decision-making intelligent organisation get the proper training on how to use Power BI, who should be developing reports and dashboards in them, and learn from what other similar organisations have done.

Also getting the right partner to help with the adoption of Power BI as a reporting tool in your organisation will make a big difference to how successful you are in using it in your company. And this where Agile SharePoint comes in. Go ahead to the next section to read how we can help you maximise your investment in Power BI as a business intelligence and reporting tool.