What exactly is Power BI?

Diving into the world of Power BI consulting, I've been getting one question over and over from my family and friends: "What's Power BI all about?" My usual spiel starts with, "You've used Microsoft Excel, right?" Of course, they have—who hasn't? Then I hit them my best Hulk Hogan impression, "Imagine, brother, Excel munching its vitamins, chowing down on veggies, pumping iron, and embracing the Hulkamania way, brother! Excel transformed into a full-blown Hulkamaniac and now, it's strutting its stuff under the ring name ‘Power BI’.”

All jokes aside, let's take a step back. Excel's been our ‘go-to’ analytics tool for about 40 years, often the first taste of business software we get. It's a powerhouse—if you really dive deep and unlock its secrets, you could be the next data sorcerer. But the beauty of Excel? You don't need to be a wizard to use it. It's perfect for whipping up a quick table or solving simple math problems. Super flexible, that's Excel for you.

But, Excel's got its hang-ups. Trying to repeat steps over and over again, or getting it to automatically handle tasks, can be a headache if you don’t have some serious Excel knowledge. When you have a TON of data, it can be difficult to summarize this information. Most people that are good in excel will use Pivot Tables to summarize this information. Others will then create graphs off these pivot tables, to help create a narrative or story. Creating and updating Pivot tables can be time consuming, and that’s why many people don’t update these reports on a daily basis, let alone every hour of every day.

Now what if you could update this with “live” data, and in a moments notice, you can see an entire story of how your business is doing for month. What do your sales look like so far for the month? How is that compared to last year, or your forecast? How many safety observations have tracking to your goals?—you name it, and it's right there, up to the minute.

This is when Power BI comes in. It’s not about just about making visualizations, and telling a story through data. It’s also about automation, and time savings. It’s a win-win! With Power BI you can pull your data directly from the data sources, whether that’s a spreadsheet, SharePoint site, your ERP system, a SQL database or even your CRM system; Power BI pulls from just about every system. Not only can it pull from each of these systems, it can also mash up the data automatically. No need to use those pesky vlookup formulas anymore.

After you pull in all of the data, clean it up, mash it up, and it’s cleaned and ready to go, you can schedule how often you want this process done. Once a month, once a day, every half hour, the choice is yours.

And here's the best part: turning that data into a story. Instead of tables of data, you are using bar graphs, pie charts and scatter graphs to show real insights behind your data. The reports are automatically interactive, so you can click on one chart, and this selection will automatically filter the rest of the report. Our kids learn how to read graph’s starting in second grade. The reports are built so intuitively now, that 8 year old can run the business(not that we're letting them run the show, mind you).

Another HUGE benefit is that once these reports are set up and live, it’s published to the cloud, in which EVERYONE has the most recent version of the report. We’ve all been there, where someone makes and update to a spreadsheet, and 10 minutes later, they send an update asking you to DELETE the previous report. Now, you have to redo all of the work, because you don’t have the most recent version of the report when you are completing your analysis. That hassle? History.

So, next time you spot me around and think about asking, "What's this Power BI thing?" brace yourself. I might just keep you chatting for hours, all fired up about the wonders of Power BI. But hey, it's a tale worth telling, and who knows, you might just get hooked too!