What is Power BI?  

Power BI is simply a data transformation and reporting tool. On top of this, Power BI is an ecosystem of tools and services that convert unrelated sources of data into unified data models with useful and interactive visuals.

There are 2 main components to Power BI:

• Power BI Desktop is the windows program used for building data models developing reports.
• Power BI Service is the online software as a service offering that hosts reports for viewing, sharing and collaboration.

The main use case of Power BI is to connect to data from various sources, build relationships, write calculations, and build reports and dashboard to visualise the data and gain useful insights.

How can you secure Power BI?

Power BI is one part of Microsoft’s Power Platform offering, so it integrates with your Azure Active Directory. This means that it is easy to restrict who has access to reports. It is also easy to set up data-level security so that users can only see the data they are entitled to see – for example store managers only seeing sales data for their store.

What are the most common mistakes with Power BI implementations?

Every Power BI implementation has its own set of challenges, but there are some we see regularly that can easily be avoided.

The number one issue that leads to slow reports is a result of not focusing on the data modelling. Power BI works incredibly fast with huge data volumes when the model is designed appropriately to suit Power BI’s performance engine. If the data model design is left as an afterthought, inefficiencies will be introduced as developers try to meet end user requirements. These can add up and unnecessarily slow down a report. To avoid this, when working with Power BI make data model design a top priority.

Another common pitfall is trying to use one report to meet the needs of every department in a company. While this is possible, managing it can quickly become a nightmare. Each department likely has its own data and its own requirements. So it often makes sense to logically separate these into separate datasets and reports. This helps the report developers focus on each department’s requirements separately.

Want to find out more about how Power BI can help you build your business strategy? Get in touch and we'll take you through the process.