With the amount of data circulating in real-time on the internet, companies find it difficult to exploit and understand it using traditional tools.
The best tool on the market now that helps to analyze and to visualize the raw data is Power BI, a business intelligence tool provided by Microsoft, that helps you among other great options, create different charts and graphs to do your visualization.
Those graphs and analytics are usually presented in reports, and that will be the focus of my article today. I will give you all you need to know about Power BI reports, how to make one, the benefits of it, etc. So, let’s hope right into it!
What are Power BI reports and why are they so popular?
Normally, when searching for solutions or innovative ideas, you will directly use the raw data you’ve been collecting in the production process. These data are usually big, so you will probably need a tool to do your analysis, and also your visualization.
That’s what Power BI mostly do, it helps you do your analysis easily with their very powerful tools, and helps you create reports where you can visualize your results, and explain them in detail to your boss.
These reports will also help the reader understand your results and solutions in-depth, without having previous knowledge of the subject. To be short, it helps you transform your raw data into visually pleasing graphs, with details and explanations to support them.
What types of Power BI reports can you use?
Your Power BI reports will heavily depend on your job role and project. Mainly, it can be summarized into 6 major categories:
- 1
Digital marketing reports:
These will help the marketing managers to identify some problems to solve while optimizing marketing budgets and increasing revenue.
- 2
Website analytics reports:
This will help the company’s SEO team to gain some important insights about the performance of their website, through its analytics.
- 3
Customer profitability reports:
The customer profitability report will help the managers identify the key metrics of their business, like the products and the gross margins among others. It will also help them understand the factors impacting profitability.
- 4
Sales analysis reports:
The sales team is the one benefiting from these types of reports, as Power BI has many samples of it, that can be downloaded for future use. These reports help analyze different sales-related parameters.
- 5
HR analytics reports:
The HR professionals use this report to get insights into the HR KPIs of the organization. These will help them make strategic decisions, monitor workforce metrics, and improve employee productivity.
- 6
Financial analysis reports.
These reports will enable the company’s Chef Financial Officer (CFO) to work more efficiently on their financial planning.
What is the difference between Dashboards and Power BI reports?
To understand the difference between Dashboards and Power BI reports, we will divide it into two categories:
Information Level
This category will explain the type of information you can get from both. For the dashboard, you will have only the vital information summarized into graphs.
But reports have all the details spread into multiple pages, with additional analysis of the large data set.
Interactivity
Because Dashboards are concise and short, they won’t give the reader a level of interactivity, but with the reports, they can change the tables from monthly to yearly for example, which shows the flexibility of the reports.
Which one should you use to create your data reports?
The type used to create a data report depends on your set criteria for a good data report.
First, your report should provide the information clearly and to the point, and that should be by using graphs and charts that answer your questions directly.
And secondly, you should be able to visualize and monitor your data at a specified frequency, which means giving the historical data while also providing the one collected in real-time.
To do that, you will mostly need an active Dashboard for that, as reports will mostly focus on the details in general and not a specific thing. But also, the dashboard will not give you the freedom to choose your metrics.
So what I can say is, depending on what you prioritize, these 2 types will do the jobs, but normally professionals prefer using reports in this case.
How to create an engaging Power BI report in just minutes?
To create engaging Power BI reports, you should first install Microsoft Power BI on your computer. It’s so easy to do, and this will help have all the powerful tools of Power BI directly into your computer.
Power BI is easy to use, as it mainly relies on the drag-and-drop method, and everything is presented to you in the menus, so it will be easy for you to find your specific tool, or also to learn the many others available.
For example, once you enter your software, you will have to upload the data you will use to apply the tools. This can be done by selecting Get Data from the menu, and then choosing your dataset, it can be from a database or located on your local computer.
Another important thing, there are two panels that you will probably use the most while creating your report: The Visualizations and Filters panels control. These will provide all the tools to make your graphs and filter your data, to get the best results.
How can Power BI report benefit your business?
As I said before, Power BI has so many tools and options that will make the making of your reports easy, and of course will benefit your business by using it.
I will try and list some of the many benefits these reports have on your business:
Final thoughts
Power BI is a very powerful tool that has been the trend lately to help companies upgrade their businesses, and get a very high productivity level to reach their goals and become leaders in their field.
And apart from that, Power BI helps you make very interesting reports that will make you stand out from your colleagues and give the best results.
These types of reports are the best when you want to convince your boss or client about an idea, which will be based on raw data difficult to explain, so Power BI will do all the explanations for you.
