Discover 11 key benefits of Microsoft Power BI for businesses looking to create a data-driven culture.
The demand for business intelligence (BI) software is rapidly growing and is expected to reach a value of $13 billion by 2025, according to Gartner. As BI software becomes more accessible and affordable thanks to cloud and low-code offerings, businesses are able to harness the power of their data and gain impactful insights that enable them to make better data-driven decisions.  Â
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If you’re in the market for a self-service business intelligence and data analytics solution,
you have likely come across Microsoft Power BI in your search. But is it the right fit for your company? In this article, we’ve rounded up the key benefits of Power BI for businesses and highlighted some of its more impressive features. Here’s what you’ll need to know if you’re considering Power BI.
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI iis a suite of business intelligence (BI), reporting, and data visualization tools and services for businesses. It converts your raw data into interactive dashboards and visualizations. This allows you to analyze your data more efficiently, spot trends and patterns, and obtain actionable insights to make better business decisions. Power BI consists of several elements that all work together and let you create and share business insights. It also offers different products based on your business needs. For instance:
📊 Power BI Desktop (Free)
Power BI Desktop is a complete data analysis and reports creation tool that you can install for free on your computer. You can create reports, connect with up to 70+ data sources, conduct your analysis, and much more.
📊 Power BI Pro
Power BI Pro is the complete paid version of Power BI and is suitable for most small and mid-sized companies. This cloud-based self-service analytics tool allows you to build dashboards and reports and embed them into apps, share them with users, and integrate them with other Microsoft solutions.
📊 Power BI Premium Per User
This version is best suited for larger enterprise organizations with many users. It includes all the features in Power BI Pro, along with more advanced capabilities, such as advanced AI, self-service prep for big data, and advanced datasmarts.
📊 Power BI via Microsoft Fabric
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You can also access Power BI with Microsoft Fabric, a data analytics solution that unifies a company’s data and analytic workloads under one platform.
📌 Further Reading: Microsoft Power BI Pro vs. Free vs. PremiumÂ
What are the Key Benefits of Power BI?
Power BI empowers organizations to create a data-driven culture and get more done with AI. Here’s how your company can benefit from this cloud BI solution:
✅ Build Personalized Dashboards & Interactive Reports Easily
Power BI is known for its dashboards, which can be customized to fit your company’s requirements. It also has intuitive and interactive visualizations. Plus, thanks to the easy drag-and-drop functionality, your staff can easily generate custom reports quickly. You can easily choose from limitless options and produce powerful models and visualizations.
✅ Gives You Access to Real-Time Information
Your dashboards will update in real time. As data is pushed or streams in, the dashboard will display and update your visuals with the new information, as data is updated several times per day. This gives your staff the ability to solve problems quickly, identify opportunities, handle time-sensitive data, or situations more efficiently.
✅ Supports a Wide Range of Data Sources & Integrations
You can import data from a wide range of data sources. Power BI seamlessly integrates with all Microsoft products, such as Dynamics 365, Excel, Azure, and more. It also offers data connectivity with third-party tools and solutions, like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Spark, Hadoop, and more. It can also connect to data files (such as XML and JSON) and SQL server databases. This means you will be able to connect to all sorts of data sources for your analysis and reports.
✅ Offers an Unparalleled Excel Integration
Many businesses still heavily rely on Excel when it comes to analytics and reporting efforts. Power BI integrates seamlessly with Excel. You can easily connect queries, data models, and reports to Power BI dashboards and create interactive visualizations - without learning a new application or language. You can set it up so that you get the right data instantly when you open your dashboard.
✅ Affordable and Cost-Effective Pricing Model
Compared to equivalent business intelligence and analytics tools, Power BI is relatively inexpensive and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses. It also offers numerous versions so that you can pick the one suited to your business. For instance, Power BI Pro is ideal for small and mid-sized companies, and you can get access to a host of features for as little as $10.00 USD per user per month.
✅ Offers AI Capabilities to Help You Get More Done
With Power BI, you can easily leverage intuitive AI features that effortlessly identify patterns in data, generate reports in real-time, deliver insights, and much more. For instance, the Anomaly Detection feature enhances your line charts by automatically detecting anomalies in your time series data. Copilot in Microsoft Fabric you gain instant actionable insights from AI-generated analysis that takes your questions or requests and pulls the relevant data into a report.
✅ Enables Collaboration by Simplifying Report Sharing
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Power BI enables team collaboration as you can easily share dashboards or reports within Power BI workspaces and allow co-ownership of a report or dashboard. It also has a ‘Chat in Teams' button for reports, and you can create Power BI tabs within Microsoft Teams so that everyone in the channel gets notified when a new report is available. You can also embed a report to an external site, or share links to reports via Outlook.
✅ You Can Access Power BI from Anywhere
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Power BI makes it easy for you and your team to access reports and dashboards from anywhere, whether you're on a way to a client meeting, working from home, or on-the-go. It can also be accessed through iOS, Android, and Window devices. As long as you have an internet connection, you can access reports instantly.
✅ Fosters a Data-Driven Culture Without Needing Specialized IT Support
As a self-service business intelligence platform, Power BI is easy to use and empowers your staff to create analyses and reports without requiring a technical or IT team to help. Power BI supports a natural language interface, uses intuitive designer tools, and has a simple drag-and-drop functionality available to create dashboards. It also has a host of free training resources so anyone on your team can learn how to work with data.
✅ Allows You to Easily Govern and Protect Your Data
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Power BI leverages the same robust security framework that has earned Azure its reputation for safeguarding the world’s most sensitive data. Seamlessly integrating with Microsoft 365’s cutting-edge information protection and compliance tools, it goes beyond standard measures to provide multi-layered security. This comprehensive approach ensures end-to-end protection, effectively addressing the unique challenges of the cloud era. For more information on data security, check out the Power BI security white paper.
✅ Regular Monthly Updates So You Can Access Latest Features
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Finally, another striking feature of Microsoft Power BI is that there are regular monthly updates made to the platform. Microsoft also listens to the Power BI community suggestions and implements most asked for functionality on the regular. This means users always have access to the latest and advanced features to help make accurate business decisions.
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Further Reading:
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At a Glance: Top 5 Benefits of Power BI
Is Power BI Right for Small & Mid-Sized Businesses?
Microsoft Power BI may be right for your business if you are looking for reporting and analytical capabilities that go beyond Excel. With Power BI, you can easily visualize and analyze data across your entire business and gain deep insights into your operations and performance.
Recognized by Gartner for the seventeenth consecutive year as an industry-leading business intelligence platform, Power BI can help you drive better decisions across your organization.
We have rounded up some of our resources to help you learn more about Power BI and the importance of business intelligence:
Get Started with a Trusted Power BI Partner
Whether you are still evaluating your business needs, need help getting started with Power BI, or need to get more out of your existing Power BI platform, Kwixand Solutions can help. As certified Microsoft Power BI partners, our consultants guide businesses across Canada and the US through every step of their digital transformation journey.
Book a free consultation with us to get started.
