Did you know that the Power BI Business Suite does not benefit from “CTRL+ Z”
Press “F1” for Help
You know what “CTRL+ Z” stands for right? We all do. It means undoing the previous action that the user has made. It is a Microsoft driven acronym that’s been deeply immersed into our hearts. Keep this in mind and read forward, you’re up for a rude awakening.
According to this study, a person can be grouped according to how they take in information, making them either a visual learner, a kinesthetic learner or an auditory learner. Guess what? The people around your business are human beings and 65% of the population according to that study, is a visual learner.
Microsoft, love and hated. They started out with Access and came a long way since. They did their homework and knew something was missing from their current data management system. They have a proven legacy of experience in data transformations. In 2006 they came up with Power Pivot as an add on of Excel. Today, Pivot has developed into a SaaS data management tool that allows you to create real time interactive charts, benefit of cheap cloud storage and show off with fancy chart customizations using simple query language.
The Power of Visual
Spend the next 20 seconds navigating into this link and click around. Experience what you could achieve with Power BI, I’ll focus on explaining why is so important to gain control of your data.
You cannot hate Microsoft after that.
They came up with exactly what we needed, a Business Intelligence and analysis suite that enables the user to easily produce and share business dashboard metrics. They say that when you get married to someone you are getting married to the whole family. Same with Power BI, it is not just a software, it is a SaaS, you marry the whole collection connected services, servers and apps.
You guessed right, your users can dance along to the Microsoft rhythm of “copy paste” and “ctrl+save” but will not pair up with “ctrl+z”. Though I can make a thousand weird jokes around it it is still an incredibly powerful and drag and drop tool that allows you to create, store and download reports of almost anything. It manages from very simple data tables to huge relational databases, whatever your business uses it can adapt. It has also been designed for the end user to analyze a large data set without any knowledge of a database programming language. It is a plus if you do, but there is no need really though. SQL is trainable, for sure.
The Power of well thought Features
As boring as it sounds we need to go through a few of its features.
- Allows sourcing from more than 90 different data funnels, not necessarily from the Microsoft technology. In case you were wondering Facebook is also included or any service in the cloud whatsoever.
- It’s a multi platform tool and all of its apps for its features are in house. In basic english it this means that you can use the Power BI desktop application while in the office, or the cloud version while you are on a business trip, or even the mobile app version while commuting. All of its usability power features and visual results will be available in all of its platform.
- It’s a collaborative suite and offers several and interesting ways to share results, like embedding the above dashboard with a html link, or pushing the report into your colleagues apps.
- Implementing its so easy that you might think there is catch to it. Again, it is a microsoft package so you literally need minutes, I installed the free software, link here.
- We can customize the service to your need. You can choose to use a local or the on-premise software, but you might need a server to host it, or you can go all Mario Brothers and jump to cloud mode for only 10 USD a month.
- Licencing is important, for the costs builds up according to the number of users or the capacity you purchase. Test using the free version and choose wisely hence after.
Power Today and Prepare for Tomorrow
Self service cashiers, medical records in blockchain, fintech banking and robo dealers at your local casino are not just examples of how the IA might impact your world as you know it. The machines are here and it has changed both the business and the organization as you know it. The data is the input you need to have the machines behave as you want them to. The relationship between data mining with Power BI(as the processes of capturing data trends within large sets of data) and machine learning is very tight. They both use the exact same learning methods, but with different goals.
According to Wikipedia, Machine Learning employs data mining methods as “unsupervised learning” method or as a step to improve their learning accuracy. Data Mining instead, focuses on discovering behavior out of making patterns. As you can see, data is the source, the fuel, the tool, the output and the reason. Microsoft knew this before you and I did, and came up with the Azure Framework. IBM is also in the right path cognitive learning and clearly, they understood this also pretty well.
Power BI can manage your existing messy data layers as well as organizing the new, eventhough you might decide to go all Arduino or all Python, there are integrations you can have to feed your technology. In case you are into Big Data projects, don’t search elsewhere, it is the perfect integration. Connect your data layer and push the information into the Api and he’ll do the rest to make it visual.
From my point of view, the IOT (the internet of things) is the Delorian to the future. It fast forwards my perceptions to a true postmodern era. Being brought up in a mechanical era where you needed to get up to change the TV channel, the Alexa and sensorial wifi information exchange feels like living Futurama. Information through your wifi needs a computer’s wireless adapter that translates data into a radio signal and using an antenna, your wireless router will receive the signal and decode it. Your Power BI suite will capture these 01010101010 thingies amongst other data formats, source all to a same server and translate it them all into an homogeneous data set you can work with by filtering data through a ETL or “extract, transform, load”. Feel like knowing what the Microwave has to say? Get sensor on Amazon and conversate your lonliness to happiness.
Basically this is what will happen:
A thought; If by any chance you are working under the Azure environment.. stop thinking, for this is the appropriate data manipulation tool that will integrate smoothly.
Understanding machines is not a nice to have anymore
Have you ever wondered how machines talk to each other? Ok, they use a Ethernet Cable Ethernet and a Transmission Control Protocol. Data in and data out in something you do not don’t speak or control. Why is humanity pushing itself to IA I don’t know, but the digital transformation path of any business will eventually arrive to the creation, storage and mandatory manipulation of data for its machines to use and output something you need and control.
This might sound odd but spending hours in Excel attempting to produce useful information that could be automated today by a root sounds exhausting and kinda waste of time…
Don’t waste decades of useful information and Power up your business by giving your customer what they need using what you own: your data, without expensive storage or excesive fixed costs.
The question of “Is this appropriate for my business?” is outdated and should not be on your next board meeting. You should be replacing it for “How can I prepare my business for the upcoming IA changes?” For that revolution my friends, there is certainly no “CTRL+Z”.
