Why is everyone switching to
Power BI? I'll tell you why. I also have an announcement to make, which
is going to come later on. First of all, let's zoom out. What is Power BI? What is it
used for? Power BI is a Microsoft business intelligence application. That's what
the BI stands for, Business Intelligence. This application helps you combine data
from different sources and systems, and then shape and present it in a way, so you
understand what's going on in the business. So basically, with this single app you get to do
two crucial tasks. One, identify dangers before they explode into massive headaches so basically
you get to put out fires before they spread, and two, on the upside, you get to discover
opportunities that will grow the business and probably make you look like a hero. It sounds like
a magic tool. But actually, talking about magic, look at this, it's the Gartner Magic Quadrant for
analytics and business intelligence platforms. So Gartner is an I.T consulting firm that publishes
market research reports which show the position of the vendors within their market, whether they're
leaders or followers. Look at where Microsoft is right now. So according to this, Microsoft
understands where the market is going and they're executing that vision ahead of everyone else. This
is throwback to 2018. This is where Microsoft was. It was still a leader but it was closer to the
pack. That's amazing considering that Power BI was first released in 2011, compared to Tableau
which was released in 2005. Now, Microsoft is like shooting off, they're running away from the
pack. They're becoming the trendsetter in the business intelligence field. They're implementing
what customers want. They're investing heavily because there's demand, and if there's demand
this means that companies are implementing Power BI Solutions, which also means that they
need people who know how to implement it. Now, it gets interesting. Can Power BI reports be
created by anyone? You know, in my old company, we had self-service business intelligence tool,
which by the way is what Power BI is as well. When I first heard that term self-service, I
thought, you know, I can serve myself, like Excel, I opened it up, move stuff around, do my analysis,
do my calculations, and then close it, goodbye. But no, that wasn't the type of self-service that
was offered. It was more like this, first, I log a call, which meant open a ticket, then have a bunch
of back and forths, explaining what I wanted with screenshots and examples. Then, I had to wait
for approval, once that was done, it would be sent off to specialized external consultants for
implementation. Then, it will finally be my turn to test in the test environment, usually at that
point, there was one or more things that needed fixing, so we had more back and forths. And if
we were lucky, it would, at some point, go live, and if we were lucky, what we wanted three months
ago, was still valid that day, which wasn't always the case. So yeah, that was my experience of
a self-service BI tool and this type of tools, as you can imagine, are also very expensive for
businesses. They can't afford to spend so much on just reporting. That's why Power BI is now the
leader in their market. Because, in my opinion, it solves four main business problems. One is
the problem of sharing reports. This wasn't always easy. If your reports were in Excel, you
had to keep sending these around. If they were on the web, you needed to use the browser to access
them or maybe a special app that you had to use to access them. With Power BI, you have multiple
options. You can view your reports on the browser, you can view them from your mobile, you can
embed Power BI reports live in a PowerPoint presentation, You can embed these reports on a
website. You can add a Power BI report in your Teams channel. You can also connect your Excel
files to your Power BI data. So you set up your datasets and reports in Power BI once, and then
you can access them pretty much from everywhere. There's also security that you can set which
defines what different people can see. Now, on top of that, you can also set alerts so you get email
notifications when a threshold is passed. You can also schedule data to be automatically refreshed.
The next problem businesses had with BI tools were the long implementation times and high costs that
were associated with them. Power BI is easy to implement. It's easy to learn and it's easy to
use. To get started, you can download the Power BI Desktop app from the Office store and use it
for free. If you can use Excel, you can use Power BI. You can create reports and do it quickly and
easily. You don't have to be in IT and you don't need a coding background. And the third problem
Power BI solves is that it eliminates decision paralysis. You see, because many BI projects take
forever, they're more rigid in nature. And you can end up spending days deciding whether you actually
want to compare this value to this or to this, which one is more important. Well, with Power BI,
you can make updates with a few clicks and create different reports and different views. You're
not restricted to a certain number of reports. You also don't need a designated person to
create reports, if you don't want. You can have it like a real self-service tool where
people can create their own views and reports. Fourth problem Power BI solves is it goes beyond
just creating beautiful reports. A lot of people associate Power BI with fancy reports. Right, it
can do that but it can do a lot more. Right, it's like saying your smartphone is just for making
phone calls. Some managers like fancy reports, right? They want the interactivity, they want to
slice and dice as they need. But other managers might love detail, they want drill through and
drill down, they want tables. With Power BI, you get to cater to all of them. If someone
wants to get their hands dirty and they want to use Excel and create an Excel dashboard,
they can. They can connect to your Power BI model. That's the beauty of keeping everything in
a single place. You have one source of truth where all your data and calculations are and then, you
can create different reports in different places, Power BI or Excel. In summary, Power Bi allows you
to connect to different data sources. You get to clean the data, relate the data, create additional
calculations based on this clean data, and then, create and share your reports in super flexible
ways. Yeah, so I know it sounds like I work on the Power BI team or this video is sponsored by
Microsoft, in some way. No, it's not. But because we believe at XelPlus that Power BI is the future,
we want our community to be ahead of the curve. So the announcement that I had mentioned before is
that we just released our Fast Track to Power BI course. If you want to make the switch to Power
BI, our approach is designed for you to use Power BI at work on day one. We set it up in this way
that you start off on the fast track, so we can get you through the most important features and
concepts. This way, you get the most out of Power BI in the smallest amount of time possible. And
then, we created the expert lane, where you get to hone your skills in each aspect of Power BI. We
also made it fun and project-based. So, you start off your journey as a data analyst at a flagship
store of OfficePlus in California. Your go-to app at the start is Excel but you feel the shift to
Power BI is coming, so you decide to give it a go and create your first Power BI report. But yeah, I
don't want to give away too much details, but you do end up getting promoted to a senior position
at OfficePlus headquarters. And there, things are a lot more challenging though, in terms of data
cleaning, data modeling, and the calculations that they need than they were in your previous job, so
you need to level up your skills to cater to these challenges. And who knows, you might even run into
the Office noob and teach her some tricks. If you want to be ahead of the curve, like Microsoft,
and have a massive advantage over the others in the field, join our course and we're going to get
you Power BI fluent in no time. More info about the course is available below the video, check it
out, I'd love to see you on the inside.
