Introduction to Power BI

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/power-bi-overview​

• Power BI Desktop  -  an application that you download and install for free on your local computer and it only runs on Windows​

• Power BI Online Service  - a cloud-based service, or software as a service (SaaS), free to PSU users and can be used for creating and sharing visualizations within the organization; it is easy to integrate with other MS apps such as Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint). For example, automatically sync visuals with source data.​

Power BI for Data Analysis and Visualization

• Common visuals for interactive reports and dashboards – bar chart, pie chart, map, treemaps, matrix table, and line graphs.​

• Special analysis and visualization tools – scatter plot with animation, word cloud, KPIs, and custom apps.​

• Advanced analytics tools – forecasting, clustering analysis, AutoML for predictive analysis​.

Embed visuals on a web – https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/c.php?g=962779&p=6953732&preview=17701fce3274c2f6a46408e94aee81af ​