When it comes to business intelligence, Power BI is one of the most popular tools on the market. And for good reason – it’s incredibly powerful and versatile, and can help find key insights into your data that you might otherwise miss.
But Power BI is also complex and can be overwhelming for some users who are new to business intelligence, or data visualisation. For example, Power BI reports can be confusing when working with multiple visuals, such as pie charts, and data sets or data analytics.
To make the most of Power BI, it’s important to understand how to use the tool to its full potential. From understanding key metrics, working with data types and data modelling, you should know how to use Power BI to your advantage.
If you want to learn more about Power BI, the Excel Experts have years of experience in this field. We have drawn on that expertise to offer eight invaluable Power BI tips and tricks.
Get To Know The Power BI Interface
One of the great qualities of the Power BI interface is that it is user-friendly. There are three main building blocks to the Power BI interface: your dashboard, reports, and datasets. You can connect as many datasets to the Power BI interface as possible. Upon entering the interface, you will be greeted by your dashboard. #
Your dashboard will display a range of visualisations from your many datasets. The interface is equipped with drag-and-drop capabilities and preloaded templates that you can use to build your custom reports. Accessing data has never been so easy! Click here to learn more about the Power BI Interface over on our blog.
Power BI Dashboard Tips
Power BI continues to evolve each year. So, in order for you to get the most out of this software, you must understand how to use each feature effectively. These dashboard tips below will help you stay one step ahead.
- Tip 1 – Avoid using multiple features at once. This makes your dashboard less user friendly and you will also find that it slows it down.
- Tip 2 – You should always take your audience into account. Only give them the relevant information that will help them make decisions. Consider the device they are using the dashboard on. If it’s being viewed on a smaller device like a laptop, use less tiles as this will make the information easier to read.
- Tip 3 – Think carefully about the page layout. Ideally, you will place the most important data at the top left of the screen as most people read left to right.
Take a look at some dashboard examples to give you some inspiration. A user-friendly dashboard that uses minimal features is the key to success.
Power BI Bookmarks
You can create report bookmarks in Power BI to share insights and build stories. Bookmarks capture the current state of the report page. So, when others view the report, you can still revisit it, and it will remain in its original form. If you want to create a bookmark, start configuring your chosen report page. Select “Add” from the Bookmarks pane and give it a name.
Three Examples of Power BI Bookmarks
- Report Bookmarks
- Use Bookmarks As A Slideshow
- Assign Bookmarks To Buttons
Enabling Tooltips
A tooltip demonstrates contextual data in the form of a pop-up when you hover over or click on a chart that is presented on a report in your dashboard. If you want to manually set up a tooltip, you will first need to select the visual that you want to specify – usually, this would be a chart. Select “Format” and expand the tooltip card in the visualisations pane – finally, select the tooltip page in the Page dropdown.
5 Popular Tooltips
- Share context for numeric using tooltips
- Include an instruction for workbook users
- Assign tasks using tooltips
- Explain a formula or calculation with tooltips
- Highlight anomalies in data and explain them
Using Power Pivot
Integrated into Power BI, Power Pivot is used for importing and shaping data. It takes huge volumes of data from various places and analyses the information very quickly. After analysing the data, Power Pivot processes it and offers valuable insights.
Power Pivot has many uses. As well as performing robust data analysis, it creates sophisticated data models – and writes advanced formulas using data analysis expressions language.
Creating Reports in Power BI
Understandably, you want to get the most out of your data when using Power Bi. Below are three top tips to assist you in creating reports.
- Tip 1 – Choose the correct dataset. Identify what you are trying to show your audience from your report. Failure to choose the right data can make your report redundant.
- Tip 2 – Highlight the purpose of your report. Why are you creating it? What questions are you trying to answer? This will help you find the right audience and assist you in choosing the right information to include.
- Tip 3 – Choose how you will visually represent your information. Some popular visuals include Comparisons, Correlation, Part-to-whole, Data Over Time, Distribution, and Ranking.
Power BI Cross-filtering Techniques
Cross filtering in Power BI provides interactivity among visuals on the page. They allow report makers to encourage interaction from their audience. The visuals you use in your reports will react to the user’s selection of other visuals on the page. Below are three examples of Power BI cross-filtering techniques:
- Highlight holiday days due to be taken by selecting a specific name
- Adjust prices to suit a selection made by the user
- Show stock numbers of selected products
Exploring Data Analytics Using Hierarchies
Hierarchy visualisations have many uses, from powerful visualisations to improving data science productivity. You can visualise hierarchical data using Power BI such as datasets that contain records with multiple subcategories. If you want to create Power BI visualisations with hierarchies, there are two ways you can achieve this: Manual hierarchies and Automatic hierarchies. You can learn more about this by getting in touch with one of our Power BI consultants over on our website.
Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop integrates the proven Microsoft query engine, data modelling, and visualisation technologies. It is a free application that allows users to connect multiple pieces of data together – a term called data modelling. It differs from Power BI as the data that is visualised cannot be shared with others.
Typically, most users will use the Power BI desktop to create visuals that will be shared with a broader audience using the Power BI service. Power BI desktop has many great uses. It can connect to data, create data models, create reports using visuals, share reports using the Power BI service and allow the user to provide visual representations of data.
FAQs
Power BI is a fantastic tool for analytics. It can help your business generate quick analytics and insights regardless of how big or small your business may be.
You can speed up your dashboard by following some simple steps. Try to remove anything that is not used and use integers where possible. Using too much data and graphics will naturally slow your dashboard down.
This feature cannot be turned off, but they are useful for anyone who uses Power BI. If you want to learn more about these features, check out our blog or contact us.
