Power BI concepts for consumers - Power BI Tutorial

- [Instructor] Models, forecast, and business intelligence are all concepts in the news these days, but none of these are new ideas. In its simple form, business intelligence is about connecting business decision making to business data, facts about the business and its environment to understand the data driven by your business so that you can make better business decisions. Until recently, business intelligence was only available at the highest organizational levels. The companies that created tools for enterprise business intelligence are large companies, SAP and Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and so on. Large companies creating really large, really expensive tools. Enterprise Business intelligence was the realm of IT professionals more than any other group of users. IT folks had to develop a great understanding of what was needed in the business so that they could get exactly the right data to create the reports that end users and business managers were requesting. So hours and even days were often spent interviewing business users so IT could create reports for the business and there was often a gap between the reports that users wanted and the reports that IT was able to deliver. Really, the first alternative to this type of business intelligence was Microsoft Excel. Because Excel allowed users to analyze data themselves for the first time, even if they had to take it offline and use data from last month or last quarter. Excel is a popular business tool precisely because so many people learned Excel to be able to get a better handle on their business, on the data in their department, or in their functional area. And Excel was for many of us, our first step into business intelligence for consumers. The very first version of Power BI was built almost totally in Excel. Microsoft has continued to evolve Power bi, however, and Power BI now is a tool set that is not Excel centric. As we begin, let's have some core understandings of what consumers do with Power BI. Power BI consumers usually begin by opening an app that was created by a Power BI designer. The app will include a data model created from one or more datasets. It can include organizational data from your company's various enterprise systems, sales, fulfillment, membership, whatever systems you have, but it can also include data from external sources. The app then will also include reports that illustrate data in the model. And don't think of reports as simply rows and rows of figures and labels. With funnel charts, tree maps, geospatial maps, slicers, and Q and A, reports in Power BI can be both informative and beautiful. And most apps also include dashboards which provide a summary view using visualizations from one or more reports. As Power BI consumers, we'll be able to sort and filter and modify reports and dashboards to garner more information from the data. Power BI Service, also known as powerbi.com, cloud Power BI, or simply referred to as Power BI, is the only tool that we will need for this course. The Power BI Service allows users to manipulate visualizations to do that deeper analysis of business information. Power BI consumers are also the primary users of Power BI mobile apps. There are other components to Power BI and I'd like to mention one, Power BI designers, data modelers, and business analysts, also use Power BI Desktop which allows designers to create the data models, reports, and dashboards for us to use. For Power BI consumers, the wins provided by Power BI include instant access to data in real time, the ability to visualize data in different ways, and finally the ability to understand the business at a deeper level.