Power BI Live Demo

What can Power BI do?

Power BI allows you to enter the world of self service business analysis. If you're familiar with the concept of Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel, it isn't too much of a leap to Power BI.

Power BI has two main parts: Power BI Desktop, which you can download to create reports, and the Power BI online service, which is used to publish and share reports. Power BI Desktop is free and can be used to create charts, graphs and report pages for your own analysis.

The online service adds sharing and collaboration. Once reports are published, authorised users can explore interactive charts, filters and visualisations rather than relying on a static PDF.

The example dashboard above is public so you can explore the interactions. To secure your own data and share reports within an organisation, you will normally need an appropriate Power BI licence.

How to use the Power BI live demo

The coloured towers on the first report page let you navigate through the different sections. You can also use the arrow buttons at the bottom of the report or select the page navigation to move directly to another dashboard view.

I've left pretty much every part of the dashboard interactive, which means you can click on anything and it will "interact" with other visualisations. If you are still struggling to see the benefit try the following

Scenario using Power BI reports

Suppose your boss has asked you to investigate how much money people with a professional occupation spend on mountain bikes.

1. From the start page click on Customer Analysis it's on page 4.
2. Click on the mountain bikes slice of the doughnut chart.
3. Now from the drop down list select professional and ensure that professional is the only one selected. You may have to untick some of the others.
4. Now you can see the results as below.