What is Microsoft Power BI, and Should I Be Using It?

April 27, 2023

Microsoft has dominated and continues to dominate the world of business software. Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word are staples in business offices (and home offices) across the globe. Even those who prefer to use Google Sheets or Docs will likely have at least one Office license for when the need arises. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are not the only tools Microsoft provides. They have Teams for team collaboration and communication, Dynamics for an all in one ERP solution (What is an ERP? Check out this post on the subject), Microsoft Power BI for business analytics, and many other solutions along with these.

So what is Microsoft Power BI, and how could your business use it? Power BI is a business analytics tool that allows you to take data from multiple different sources and create reports and dashboards that can be shared across your company.

Information is incredibly valuable, and companies will often have a wealth of it spread out across their operations. You might have price lists in Excel, use a CRM like Hubspot for tracking and communicating with potential customers, use Sage or QuickBooks for financials and accounting, and have a custom app built by Lithium for your scheduling, job tracking and other day to day operations. You have a ton of data, but how do you leverage it? How can you use it to gain insights and make decisions about your business?

If you are looking for insights on one specific segment of your business, you’ll often be able to find what you need wherever the data is coming from. For example, we’ll often build analytics sections into our apps for digging into the job costing, hours and other data. Another example might be if you are wanting some charts for some data in an Excel file, you should have no problem doing that right in Excel.

If the analytics capabilities of whatever chosen tool you are using are incomplete, or if you want to compile data from multiple sources, you could laboriously compile that data into an Excel file and figure out how to get the reports and insights you are looking for, or you could look at a tool like Power BI.

With Power BI, you can pull in data from over 120 different sources, from MySQL databases to Excel files, to CSV Files to QuickBooks and Hubspot. You can then work with the data to establish relationships across data sources, add calculations, and generate reports using a myriad of different charts.

As a test case I was able to import some tables from our in-house Lithium Ops app database, establish relationships between those tables, and generate reports on which projects we’ve spent the most time on bug fixes this year, and where we’ve spent our time overall. Doing the same thing in Excel would have been possible, but it would have been a lot more work. (We do already have an analytics tab in our app where we can grab this data in an instant, but if we wanted to compare this data against our CRM data somehow, Power BI would  have been perfect).

Once you’ve created a report, you can publish it and share it with your team members, allowing them to view it from the desktop as well as on their tablets or phones. These reports are much more than just a PDF file: users can click on charts, change sorts, filter data, and dig in deep to really figure out what is going on with the business.

Another great feature of this is the fact that depending on how your data sources are set up, you’ll potentially be able to have your reports automatically update as the data changes, a huge step above creating a new pdf and re-emailing it once a day, week or month!

So far we’ve talked a lot about the pros of Microsoft Power BI, and if we stopped right here, it might be a no-brainer to go ahead and fire it up right now, but there are a couple things to consider.

The first and biggest thing will be creating reports in Power BI will require some technical capability. Unfortunately, there’s a bit more to it than signing up and having all the reports, data and insights you could dream of at your fingertips. You (or someone on your team) will need to figure out how to get all your data connected to Power BI, and then you will need to spend time transforming the data using the Power BI tools and creating reports from it.

While working within Power BI does require some smarts, it definitely does not seem to be any more challenging than it needs to be, and like I mentioned earlier, I was able to get up and running with some basic reports fairly quickly. The average person off the street might be in over their head, but the average Excel Power User would be able to dive in and be up and running in no time.

The other thing to consider is cost. If you are creating the reports for yourself and do not need to share them with your team (or if you are fine with just sharing reports as pdfs instead of as living dashboards), Power BI is free. The Pro and Premium versions of Power BI give you and your team members the ability to share reports and access them anywhere, and they cost $10-$20/month per license depending on which level you need. Considering that you won’t necessarily need to provide access to your whole company, this really is not too expensive!

Power BI is an incredibly powerful tool. If you have data spread across many different platforms, and you’d like to be able to dig into it to gain insights and aid decision making, Power BI could definitely be worth looking into, especially if you or someone on your team has the technical expertise and capability to work with it. If you do not have the technical capabilities on your team, you could consider working with Lithium or another consulting company to get you set up with some living reports and dashboards that you’d be able to consult and analyze whenever you needed to.

Hopefully you’ve gained some insight into what Power BI is, and how your company could use it! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to chat more about Power BI, or have any questions or comments!