Chapter 14: Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power BI

Of all the Power Platform tools, Microsoft Power BI is the most recognized and has the most followers. This is due to the fact that it is an evolution of existing and widely used analysis tools such as Power Query and Power Pivot that provide data analysis capabilities within Microsoft Excel. Also, because it is a tool following the Power Platform concepts of low code and no code, it meets the needs of large initiatives of our generation, such as a data-driven culture, big data, and AI based on data.

Since placing Power BI on the market in 2015 as a specific tool for data visualization and analysis, Microsoft has increasingly stood out in the field of research using analytics tools. With the integration of this tool into the entire 365 environment, the company has moved further ahead of its competitors. In 2021, Microsoft was for the 14th time among the leaders of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence...

From a form to a Power BI dashboard

Analyzing the survey data on our dashboard more deeply can be done simply if our form was created in Excel. We just connected our Power BI to the source Excel file and thus built the charts; however, most Microsoft forms are not created this way.

To analyze the answers of forms that were not made in Excel, it is necessary to export the answers to be able to use them as a data source in Power BI. This manual work makes it difficult to act and analyze in real time, which is required in certain scenarios.

Let's use an example of a form that is available globally to collect complaints about environmental deforestation. The faster these complaints appear in the indicators and generate alerts, the more chance there is of action being effective. To technically set up this scenario, we will use three tools that we have already seen in this book (Microsoft Forms, Power Automate, and Power BI), and with them, we will have the form data in real time...

Theming your dashboard like a professional

If you have knowledge of Photoshop or advanced knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you will easily be able to build images and insert them into your graphics, giving them a unique identity and looking more pleasant. But Power BI is for all types of business users who may not even know what CSS is or what tools can make their graphics prettier. The great news is that all of this can be done using Microsoft 365 tools, specifically PowerPoint.

Through PowerPoint, we can create a layout for our Power BI reports. For that, we must create a slide, style it, and define the structure of where the graphics will be. The steps are simple, as you can see here:

1. We create a blank slide layout and use PowerPoint shapes and features to create a layout for our dashboard (Figure 14.15). Usually, the most used are rectangles, but you can use all your creativity to build a layout that is aligned with the dashboard information and users:

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Using a dashboard on your Teams channel or site

We have already seen in Chapter 8, Microsoft SharePoint Online (SPO), and Chapter 9, Working Together with Microsoft Teams, that both tools play an essential role in our productivity by being hubs that help and direct us to find what we need. One need is to quickly display and analyze dashboards created within Power BI, and these platforms make it possible for us to deliver these in a centralized and efficient way. This also brings benefits such as permissions, comments, and the addition of other content.

Within Microsoft Teams, we can replace, for example, the screenshots that are uploaded weekly from our dashboard to let people know about the company's new sales with a chart as a tab within the channel (Figure 14.20):

Figure 14.20 – Adding a dashboard as a tab in a Teams channel

When a graphic is placed as a guide, a conversation is created (Figure 14.21) within the channel, and all interactions...

Summary

Power BI gives all types of users the power to unify, treat, and visualize data in a simple way. This was previously restricted to programmers and took time to accomplish. Today, it can be done in less than 30 minutes. As Power BI is a tool from the Microsoft Power Platform and is the fastest-growing tool in this ecosystem, there are many simple materials to help you can move forward, guaranteeing better analysis and clearer and more objective decision-making.

When we use Power BI along with other tools in Microsoft 365, we can make our charts even more powerful by including real-time data and joint collaboration.

We also saw that Office tools are of great help. With the PowerPoint interface, we were able to make a simple layout for a chart, being helped with size, spacing, and colors.

Remember that Microsoft 365 is a complete platform, with numerous tools that started only with Office 365 tools. In the next chapter, we'll talk about the tools that were precursors...