Microsoft Power BI


Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end-users to create their own reports and dashboards.

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform that provides nontechnical business users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data. Power BI’s user interface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with Excel and its deep integration with other Microsoft products makes it a very versatile self-service tool that requires little upfront training.

With Power BI, you can easily connect to your Salesforce.com account. With this connection, you can retrieve your Salesforce data and have a dashboard and reports automatically provided.

  • A free version of Power BI is intended for small to midsize business owners.
  • A professional version called Power BI Plus is available for a monthly subscription fee.

 Key Components :

  1. Power BI Desktop
  2. Power BI Service
  3. Power BI Mobile Apps
  4. Power BI Gateway
  5. Power BI Embedded
  6. Power BI Report Server
  7. Power BI Premium
  8. Power BI Visuals Marketplace

 Common uses of Power BI :

  1. Microsoft Power BI is used to find insights within an organization’s data.
  2. Power BI can help connect disparate data sets, transform and clean the data into a data model and create charts or graphs to provide visuals of the data.
  3. All of this can be shared with other Power BI users within the organization.
  4. The data models created from Power BI can be used in several ways for organizations, including telling stories through charts and data visualizations and examining “what if” scenarios within the data.
  5. Power BI reports can also answer questions in real time and help with forecasting to make sure departments meet business metrics.
  6. Power BI can also provide executive dashboards for administrators or managers, giving management more insight into how departments are doing.
  7. Microsoft Power BI is used by both department reps and management, with reports and forecasts created to aid sales and marketing reps,
  8. Also providing data for management on how the department or individual employees are progressing toward their goals.
  9. In addition, Power BI offers an admin portal for administrators to help configure the implementation of Power BI, as well as usage monitoring and licenses.

Key features of Power BI :

  1. Artificial Intelligence
  2. Hybrid deployment
  3. Quick Insights
  4. Common data model
  5. Cortana integration
  6. Customization
  7. APIs for integration
  8. Self-service data prep
  9. Modeling view

How to connect Power BI with Salesforce:

1. In Power BI, select Get Data at the bottom of the nav pane.

2. In the Services box, select Get.

3. Select Analytics for Salesforce and select Get.

4. Select Sign In to start the sign in flow.

5. When prompted, enter your Salesforce credentials. Select Allow and let Power BI access your basic Salesforce information and data.

6. Configure what you’d like to import into Power BI using the drop-down option:

Dashboard: – Select a predefined dashboard based on a persona (such as Sales Manager). These dashboards retrieve a specific set of Salesforce standard data, which doesn’t include custom fields.

Reports: – Select one or more custom reports from your Salesforce account. These reports match your views in Salesforce and can include data from custom fields or objects.

7. Select Connect to begin the import process. During the import, you see a notification showing the import is in progress. When the import is complete, you see a dashboard, report, and dataset for your Salesforce data listed in the nav pane.

Included within Power BI are several components that help users create and share data reports.

  • Power Query: a data mashup and transformation tool
  • Power Pivot: a memory tabular data modeling tool
  • Power View: a data visualization tool
  • Power Map: a 3D geospatial data visualization tool
  • Power Q&A: A natural language question and answering engine