Power BI – Practical Applications

A feature of Microsoft Office 365 called Power BI gives business users access to insights from their data. Users of the software can visualize information using a range of tools, such as graphs and diagrams. In other words, Power BI serves as a link between your data and the individual who will ultimately utilize it to make crucial decisions. Power BI is a tool that businesses frequently utilize for informational purposes. When various departments collaborate on a project, for instance, it may be necessary to transmit information across them in such a way that everyone can understand. So that everyone is on the exact page as they do their individual jobs.

Applications of Power BI

1. Visualize Details Easily

Microsoft Power BI provides such tools that will let you visualize key data points accurately from various sources in a single dashboard. For instance, you can have a dashboard that displays the different products in your store, allowing you to track sales, costs, and expenses in one location. This will help managers at the same time that they keep their employees updated on sales and expenses.

2. Real-Time Performance

You can understand the Real-Time performance of enterprises on a variety of levels using Microsoft Power BI. For instance, have a dashboard that lists all of the projects that are active as well as their due dates. On these projects, you may also keep a close watch on how each individual employee is doing. This is a fantastic way to tell your team of changes and deadlines, keep them informed of one other’s duties for certain tasks, and even allow the staff to keep an eye on their own performance.

3. Sales Analysis

Another common use for business intelligence tools like Power BI is sales analysis. Multiple dashboards that display charts can be set up to monitor user activity throughout an online session. Additionally, what product categories do your clients purchase the most frequently, or which geographical areas generate the highest revenue for you? You can adjust your business practices based on this knowledge to better meet the needs of your clients and boost sales.

4. Improving Marketing

These dashboards can show all kinds of data to assist you to enhance your marketing campaign if you or the rest of your team are working on any kind of extensive marketing effort. The software can track parameters like the price at which each product is sold individually and present all of this data so that you may develop a more successful marketing plan for upcoming campaigns.

5. Create Consistent Reporting Standards

You may gather the data and produce reports using Power BI to give you consistent reporting. If the data is delivered in a graphical manner each time, it is less stressful for the managers, and takes less time to find insights from it, and the organization may find it helpful to predict information. Additionally, it enables you to carry out targeted marketing initiatives that are guaranteed to be effective.

6. Controlling Costs

The average cost of each campaign that has been running on your website can be displayed on a dashboard. This can assist you in determining which promotions will benefit your clients and your organization. It also assists you in deciding how much money to spend on anything in the future. You can also develop dashboards that show how much money is being spent on each specific campaign this will help to have proper control of the cost of each product which leads to control of the overall cost of the organization.

7. Product Development

Another typical use for business intelligence software like Power BI is product development. When it’s time to pull one product off the market and replace it with a newer and more successful one, This dashboard shows how much money is being produced for each particular product that can help your organization.

Practical Applications of Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft tool that allows you to use datasets from multiple sources and create reports and charts to address specific business needs. Using Power BI is about providing practical solutions for real-world problems, making it the perfect tool for organizations seeking quick and easy insights with minimal effort. Let’s see by creating a simple Line chart in Power BI of the Financial sales analysis dataset. Let’s see the different practical applications of Power BI:

Financial Sales Analysis in Power BI

On launching the Power BI Desktop App, we get an option to Try the sample dataset; by clicking on that option, we can import the sample Financial dataset and start using it to create our Power BI Report. 

The dataset gives insights into the Sales and Profits of certain products belonging to different segments in multiple countries over 2013-14. It comprises the following columns by default:

Step 1: First, navigate to the Data Tab and select the Table Tools options from the top navigation bar. Select the New Column option from the table tools and opportunities to create a new custom column.

Step 2: On clicking the New Column option, an input bar will appear where we will write a simple DAX expression to create our columns.

Step 3: In DAX, we can access a particular column using the following syntax – tableName[columnName],The following DAX Expression creates a new column named TotalManufacturingPrice.

     TotalManufacuturingPrice = financials[Manufacturing Price]*financials[Units Sold]

Step 4: Now, using this newly created column, we make our ProfitPercentage column using the below expression.

ProfitPercentage = (financials[Profit]/financials[TotalManufacuturingPrice])*100 

Step 5: Now, Select the Line chart from the Visualization. Drag the segment and drop to the X-axis, Again drag the ProfitPercent and drop to the Y-axis that we have created our custom columns, we can use a line chart which comes out to be like this:

Profit Analysis using Donut Chart in Power BI

Next, we will create another custom column called ProfitType to tell if the profit is positive, negative, or null. This can be done by using the IF function in the DAX Expression like this:

ProfitType = IF(financials[Profit]<0,”Negative”,IF(financials[Profit]>0,”Positive”,”NULL”)) 

Step 1: From the top navigation bar, select the New Column option from the table tools and opportunities to create a new custom column.

Step 2: Select the donut chart from the Visualization. From the field, option drag the ProfitType and drop to the values and details. This newly created column can be further used to create a donut chart, as shown below:

Analysis of most profitable day using Bar Chart in Power BI

Suppose we also want to analyze which day of the week has the most significant number of sales or profit; so for this, we can create an additional column, Weekday, by extracting the day of the week from the Date Column already provided using the DAX WEEKDAY function like this:

Weekday = WEEKDAY(financials[Date].[Date],2)

Here, the second parameter of the function refers to the return type. 

• If return type = 1, week begins on Sunday (1) and ends on Saturday (7). numbered 1 through 7.
• If Return type = 2, week begins on Monday (1) and ends on Sunday (7).
• If Return type = 3, week begins on Monday (0) and ends on Sunday (6).numbered 1 through 7.

For the above function return type is 2, i.e the week begins on Monday.

Step 1: On clicking the New Column option, an input bar will appear where we will write a simple DAX expression to create our columns.

Step 2: Using this custom column, we can plot the following bar chart and conclude that we get Maximum Profits on Tuesdays (Weekday = 2)