Practical Insights on Data Science by Arpit Gothi: Practical 6

Introduction to PowerBI

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, applications, and connectors that function together to transform cohesive, visually immersive, and collaborative insights through the unrelated knowledge sources. Power BI lets you quickly link to your data sources, imagine (or discover) what's relevant, and share it with someone or anyone you want, whether your data is a single Microsoft Excel workbook or a series of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses.

Power BI can be easy and fast, capable of generating simple insights from a local database or an Excel workbook. But Power BI is also robust and enterprise-grade, ready not only for comprehensive real-time analytics and modeling but also for custom development. It can therefore be your personal report and data visualization, but can also serve as the analytics and decision engine behind group projects, divisions, or entire corporations.

It can therefore be your personal report and data visualization, but can also act as the driver of analytics and judgment behind community ventures, departments, or whole companies.

Key features of Power BI

Microsoft has added a number of data analytics features to Power BI since its inception and continues to do so. Some of the most important features include:

Artificial Intelligence - Users can access image recognition and text analytics in Power BI, create machine learning models using automated machine learning capabilities, and integrate with Azure Machine Learning.
Hybrid deployment support - This feature provides built-in connectors that allow Power BI tools to connect with a number of different data sources from Microsoft, Salesforce, and other vendors.
Quick Insights - This feature allows users to create subsets of data and automatically apply analytics to that information.
Common data model support - Power BI's support for the common data model allows the use of a standardized and extensible collection of data schemas (entities, attributes, and relationships).