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An introduction to Power BI

When it comes to data analysis, Power BI can be just that, a powerful addition to the tools you already have available. Let's explore.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a self-service platform allowing users to interact with premade reports and create their own visualisations. Power BI desktop application is a full client with all of these extended capabilities.

How do I use it?

You use it to connect to sources, prepare your data sets for analysis, transform and cleanse your data, and create reports for consumption. Power BI in Dynamics 365 for Sales is pretty easy to set up. You simply go to the administrator portal and enable Power BI for your organisation.

The dashboard

An individual user can then create a dashboard. They can add Power BI tiles to a dashboard or add a full Power BI dashboard. And then you can also as a user share your dashboards with other users.

Keep in mind with this sharing that the Power BI security is separate from the CDS security. There are components that we work within Power BI between the desktop application and PowerBI.com. Data sets and data sources are managed mainly in the desktop application unless you are only consuming data.

Visualisations and Tiles

Visualisations are individual graphical representations. Reports are a combination of visualisations and data sets, creating tiles. Tiles can then be put together in PowerBI.com to form dashboards.

Tiles and dashboards can be displayed in model-driven apps. And tiles can be shown in Canvas apps.

Power BI for Office 365

The Power BI for Office 365 Cloud Service works with Dynamics 365 for Sales to provide a self-service analytics solution. Power BI automatically refreshes the Dynamics 365 data displayed.

And, with Power BI desktop or Office Excel Power Query for authoring reports and Power BI for sharing dashboards and refreshing data from Dynamics 365, sales personnel in your organisation have a powerful way to work with Dynamics 365 for Sales data.

Dynamic 365 for Sales

Power BI dashboards can be embedded directly into Dynamics 365 for Sales. You are not restricted to using only a full Power BI dashboard. You can also take components of a dashboard known as tiles and embed them into more traditional Dynamics 365 dashboards.

If you’d like to learn more about Power BI, check out the online course from CloudSwyft Global Systems, below.