“Think about a world without Excel. That’s just impossible for me. It is a symbol of what Microsoft is all about” – Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella

We all know Microsoft Excel is one of the most powerful applications and has become an integral part of most of the business establishments today. It has traditionally been the go-to reporting tool which works great for quick analysis. But, Let’s face it – It is not a Data Visualization tool and the available visualization elements in Excel (Charts and Graphs) are almost 2 decades old.
Power BI Microsoft another offering is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your story across broader data sets. It delivers greater insights than Excel by bringing your data to life with live dashboards and reports. More Importantly – it’s Free 

See Power BI in Action with these dashboards –

• Coffee Dashboard 
• Sales Dashboard

Reasons to use Power Bi  :

1. Data Agnostic -Connects to Excel spreadsheets, cloud data, streaming services , and on-premises databases- Almost anything and gives a holistic view of your data.

2. Cloud Based – Supports cloud based service, a single view of data is given to stakeholders to make sure everyone is on the same page.  

3. Real time Dashboards – Be aware of your activities, Instantly know when your business needs your attention. Take action at the right moment – Never miss an opportunity. 
4.  Helps you with your queries – You can use phrases and natural language to get answers to your questions – The Q&A functionality in Power BI.
5. Works on Mobile –  It supports touch enabled native apps for all the mobile platforms – Android, IOS or Windows. Make Decision on the go.

Data Visualization in Power BI

Since childhood, we all have been attracted to pictures. What we see, we always remember. Any info becomes easy to grasp when it is visualized. Similarly, large data sets can be understood easily when they are seen as graphs or charts. Power BI helps you visualize your data with these visualization

1. Bar and column charts
2. Layered and stacked area charts
3. Cards
4. Combination charts
5. Doughnuts
6. Gauge charts
7. Line charts
8. Maps
9. Matrix
10. Pie charts
11. Scatter and bubble charts
12. Tree Maps
13. Waterfall charts

Pro Tip : Slice your Data Using Slicers

Bar and column charts

Both these chart types display value using rectangular bar where the length of bar is proportional to the data value it is associated to. A bar chart is oriented horizontally where as a column chart exists in vertical form. Best suited for comparing two or more values.

Layered and stacked area charts

Area charts are of great help when you want to communicate the magnitude of the trend. Best used for demonstrating a time-series relationship – For Example Month wise Sales Report.

Cards

Card Visualization is used when you want to focus on one single number in the dashboard such as total sales, market share, no of items in inventory.

Combination charts

Combination chart combines a column chart and line chart in one single graph. It helps you compare different data sets and draw insights quickly. In the example below current year sales volume ( displayed as column charts ) can quickly be compared to the data of last year ( line graph )

Doughnut charts

A doughnut chart is essentially a Pie Chart with an area of the center cut out, this space can be used for putting a label or some image. Useful when you want to compare different categories – the size indicates the category proportion as a whole.

Gauge charts

Gives you a quick snapshot of your goal/KPI. Needle displays the target value of the goal and shades the left region to indicate the progress. Useful when you want to track performance over a specific key metric.

Line charts

Line charts are used to visualize the value of something over a time series. Pretty simple to understand. In the example below different line charts can be visualized for each of the category using Slicers.

Maps 

Fully Integrated with Bing Maps Power BI produces accurate map charts which are perfect for displaying both categories and quantitative data linked to a place in the map.

Matrix

Useful when you want to display tabular data with multiple dimension with a drill down experience.

Pie charts

Pie Charts are very useful when you want to visualize High level data with different categories.

Scatter and bubble charts

Useful when you want to depict values along both the axis lines. It displays values at the intersection and the size indicates the value related to it.  

Tree Maps

Displays hierarchical data as a combination of different rectangles. Each level is indicated by a rectangle which contains other rectangles. The size of each rectangle displays the value being measured and is arranged from the largest to the smallest.

Pro Tip Slice your Data, Customize Your Visual using Slicers

A slicer is an option of filtering through other visualization in a report that narrows the portion of the dataset selected. For Example – In the below figures Slicers are used to highlight the performance of each district level manager.

Thats it, we just covered some features of Power BI and made you aware of its Visualization Capabilities. Plenty of more Visualizations are available as separate add on’s to the Visualization Module. Let us know if you are aware of any other visualization chart that can be useful for gaining better insights. To Learn more about Power BI and how it can be used for your business contact us here.