Power BI: The Bridge Between Data & Insights

Interpreting code and its various outputs can be intimidating for those who are not the creators of the code. This is especially true for those who do not have coding experience, seeing the code can be an off-putting experience and can seem like a foreign language. The less visually friendly the code appears, the more challenging it becomes for non-technical stakeholders to understand and make informed decisions based on it. Fortunately, there’s a solution that bridges this gap between complex code and understanding – Power BI.

Using Power BI

Power BI is a tool that enables you to visualise code and its outputs in a user-friendly and visually striking format. This tool can revolutionise how non-technical stakeholders interact with and understand complex data processes. By transforming lines of code, statistical analyses, and business insights into interactive graphs, charts, and dashboards, Power BI enables data consultants to communicate their insights effectively, regardless of the audience’s technical background.

Power BI enables us, as data consultants, to craft distinctive and captivating dashboards for conveying ideas and enhancing emotions, styles, or corporate identities. The art of dashboarding has empowered me to produce visual aids for stakeholder meetings and provide stakeholders with tangible dashboards brimming with KPIs and analytics, which they can review long after the meetings have concluded.

In the picture above is an example of a dashboard created to examine restaurant occurrences in London. The process involved coding to web scrape reviews on various types of cuisine around London. Then, code was used to perform all the necessary transformations to display the sum of positive and negative reviews for each cuisine type. However, this is not something you’d want to present to a client. It’s hard to follow, drawn out, uninspired, and honestly unattractive. Power BI enhances the aspects that need to be highlighted.

While the pink and white colour scheme may not work in every setting, it provides a striking contrast that draws your attention to what’s important. Moreover, it offers interactivity, allowing you to easily filter through cuisines and update the graphs and KPIs as you go. This level of customization enables me to create exactly what is needed for each meeting, presentation, or long-term dashboard, including the ability to import images for the client’s company logo.

In-App Data Transformations

Power BI truly shines in its ability to effortlessly generate new columns and perform complex aggregations within the application. With this feature, you can transform your raw data into meaningful insights with ease. Whether it’s calculating sums and averages, or creating custom columns to derive specialized metrics, Power BI empowers you to navigate and manipulate data in ways that are both intuitive and powerful.

This functionality not only streamlines the data preparation process but also allows for the creation of dynamic, interactive dashboards that tell a compelling data-driven story. Power BI’s capability to handle these tasks with finesse is a game-changer for anyone seeking to unlock the full potential of their data.

The Bridge Between Data & Insights

Power BI stands as an indispensable tool in my arsenal as a data consultant. Its capacity to seamlessly blend data from diverse sources, its intuitive interface for crafting visually appealing reports, and its dynamic abilities to generate new columns and perform complex aggregations empower me to turn data into actionable insights.

The flexibility it offers in designing customised dashboards and the interactive features that engage clients in exploring data further make it an invaluable asset in my consultancy work. Power BI doesn’t just assist in data analysis; it elevates the entire data consultancy experience, enabling me to provide clients with the precise, insightful, and visually compelling information they need to make informed decisions. It’s not just a tool; it’s a game-changer that enhances my capabilities and ultimately drives success in the world of data consulting.

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