Top Three Reasons to Get Started Using Power BI
Intro
Upon graduating from Georgia Gwinnett College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Information System, I was told to become proficient in at least one data visualization tool, in order to become successful at what I do, transforming data into stories. Immediately, I decided to complete online courses through Coursera, to further enhance my knowledge of data analysis. Once completed, I was knowledgeable enough to say I had Tableau experience and a few dashboards to prove it. Over the last few years, data visualization has impressively grown in more ways than one. From Tableau, to Power BI, data visualization has become the means of a business’s success. In order to beat the odds, or to see where you and your competitors line up within the industry, you must have data to show what your company is trying to portray, and how might they do that you ask, by turning your data into a story and effectively displaying what is in your head onto a dashboard. When deciding on which visualization tool best fits your company’s needs, there are three top reasons to consider using Power BI, how efficient the tool is, the continuous growth of the tool within other top companies around the world and how easy the tool is to learn. In the next few paragraphs, I will discuss the top three reasons to get started using Power BI and how lucrative it just might be for your company.
Thinking Smarter Not Harder while Storytelling
In the online courses I’ve completed, I was able to see exactly what data analysis was and how to use Tableau to effectively present an analysis of the given data. Tableau was something I became excited to use, from the way the visuals could interact with each other, to the number of different visuals I could use, it was a huge step up from the only visualization tool I was exposed to before then, Microsoft Excel. Once I became a Data Visualization Analyst, seeing all that was now accessible to me, I decided to become more versatile and learn Microsoft Power BI to enhance my knowledge in visualization. My first impression of Power BI caught my immediate interest in furthering my knowledge in this tool so I could find new and greater ways to turn data into stories. Once I saw the amount of visuals Power BI offered, I realized how much easier it would be to turn a previous version of a dashboard into something new and improved. When companies are looking for a Data Visualization expert to successfully present a story of their data, one of the main things they look for is efficiency, being the number one reason to get started using Power BI. It also gives a way of thinking smarter not harder in order to reach goals set by the stakeholders and save money, all at the same time.
Before companies requested analysts to use Power BI for reporting, Tableau was the top means of visualization, forming experts around the world that could do wonders with data, easily presenting to stakeholders more information in a single dashboard than ever before. Now that Tableau has a direct competitor, a lot of these experts are learning to develop the same type of dashboards, but more efficiently and effectively with Power BI. Being on the rise the last few years, more companies see what Power BI can do and, due to its global success, the audience and attention has grown substantially and continuously grows over time, being the number two reason to start using Power BI.
Getting Started with Power BI
Many employers are learning more reasons to consider using Power BI over Tableau for reporting, which brings us to the third and final reason to get started using Power BI, how easy it is to learn. To get started with Power BI one could start by watching free online tutorial videos and download free data sets to gain experience. From starting off using Tableau, to migrating over to Power BI, I can honestly say it was much easier to learn Power BI than it was to learn Tableau, and even easier for stakeholders to understand than before.
Conclusion
Over the last several years, data visualization has continued to rise within companies, helping transform data into greater stories and giving them the information needed to save tons of money over time. Making the switch from Tableau to Power BI was a way to enhance my visualization skills and use these new visuals to transform data into stories, and what better way to present this data, than to make it easy to read and even easier to get started with.
