In today's fast-paced business landscape, staying ahead of the competition requires efficient and effective solutions. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, nearly 70% of employee report that they don’t have sufficient time in the day to focus on “work”, with more time being spent Communicating than Creating.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed, with Microsoft’s cloud trust platform at its core, to allow for employees to both be more productive, reduce the time spent searching for information, performing mundane tasks, and other low-value activities.
Power BI
Several years ago, there was a blog post written about the 5 reasons that you should use Power BI. In this revisiting of the topic, I’m going to take a look at all the new features added as well as the things that have shown themselves to be more useful as time has marched on.
1. Customization
Whether you are trying to make a perfectly tuned box and whisker plot, a novel infographic, or build something completely new, the built-in Python and R visuals unlock a whole new world of advanced visualization. If the the level of customization isn’t enough for you and you aren’t scared of a bit of JavaScript, then you could create a custom visual. Not to mention the custom visual marketplace, which is full of great visuals including maps, slicers, and much more.
If your visual needs are met but there isn’t a way to connect to your data, then there is always the option of developing a custom data connector. Or, if you are more familiar with data cleaning and engineering with Python or R scripts there are custom script data sources as well.
2. It stays fresh
Since Power BI Desktop receives monthly updates, and the service is updated weekly, there are always new features and creature comforts being added. Many of which are requested by the community!
3. Community
Speaking of community, Power BI's is very active and helpful. A lot of it centers around powerbi.com, community.powerbi.com, blog.powerbi.com, and local user groups. Using those sites, you can request a new feature or vote on other suggestions, get answers to technical questions, and read up on the newest features in desktop and the service, community challenges, webinars, and much more. There are a bunch of local user groups for Power BI or SQL Server, and many of them have started to provide online meetings.
4. Power Platform
As you could expect from the name, Power BI is part of the larger Power Platform which includes PowerApps and Power Automate. All these platforms interconnect and can affect one another. For example, you can embed a PowerApp in a Power BI report, allowing people to turn data into action. You could also use Power Automate to trigger a Dataset refresh based on any number of triggers such as data-driven alerts, Files being uploaded to SharePoint, new rows being inserted into a table in SQL, and many more.
5. DataFlows
DataFlows allow a few people on a team who are more familiar with data modeling/transformation to curate common business logic for others to use, reducing the chances of the same metric showing differently in two places. While this functionality exists in many other places (SQL, Oracle, etc.) the ability to have the same knowledge and UI for query building in Power BI desktop carry over to an ETL tool means this pattern is more accessible to people who would traditionally not work in the BI space.
SQL Server Health Check
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