Business Intelligence (BI) takes your business reporting a step further, allowing you to drill down into your business and market data and ask questions as you go. BI works from within Excel so is familiar and easy to use and provides you with up to the minute insight into your business and market as you operate. You can make better informed business decisions, in real time. This is self-service business analytics.
Business Intelligence has always been the preserve of enterprises, with Power BI Microsoft has revolutionised the market for small and medium businesses – insight is now affordable and payable on a monthly basis. What’s more, it’s primarily delivered through Excel, which everyone is familiar with, so you can deploy this as widely as you like within the business to empower your teams.
Create data models and interactive reports and publish them online in your company’s secure Power BI site so that your staff can use them from anywhere, on any device. Control the data and who has access to it centrally. Best of all, as this is self service analytics for all your data you will never need an IT department to create reports for you again.
What does it give you?
Discover and combine data with Power Query
Easily discover and connect to data from company and public data sources. This includes new data search function in Excel, as well as the ability to easily transform and merge data from multiple data sources so that you can continue to analyse it in Excel.
Model and Analyse with Power Pivot
With Power Pivot, you create your own customisable data model from various sources, and model and structure it precisely to fit your needs. All data can be refreshed straight from the original source, as often as you want. Formatting and filtering data is easy; you can create calculated fields, define key performance indicators (KPIs) to use in PivotTables and create user-defined hierarchies to use throughout a workbook.
Visualise with Power View and Power Map
Use Power View to create reports and analytical views through interactive charts and graphs that help you explore and present your data visually in Excel.
Explore and navigate geospatial data on a 3D map experience with Power Map. Power Map for Excel is a three-dimensional (3D) data visualisation tool for Excel 2013, which provides a powerful method for people to look at information in new ways. It enables the data discoveries that might not be seen in traditional two-dimensional (2D) tables and charts. With Power Map you can plot geographic and time data visually, analyse that data on a 3D globe and over time, and create visual tours to share with others.
Share and Collaborate with Power BI Sites
Power BI Sites are the heart of your collaborative Power BI experience. Quickly create collaborative Power BI Sites for your team to share and view reports. Share queries created by you and easily find queries created by other people in your organisation. Connect to on-premises data sources and schedule refreshes for your reports.
Ask questions with Q&A
With an instantaneous experience that understands plain English (a bit like typing a question into a search engine), Q&A interprets your question and immediately serves up the correct answer on the fly – in the form of an interactive chart or graph. And these visualisations change dynamically as you modify the question, creating a truly interactive experience with your data.
Access Anywhere
Stay connected from anywhere, on any device, with mobile access to your favourite live and interactive reports.
What does it cost?
You can buy this as an add-on to Office 365, or as a standalone solution. There is a range of plans, but the one that’s most popular with our clients is about £7.50 per user, per month.
How does it work?
Power BI essentially comes in two halves. You find and link to data sources (internal systems and any publicly available data), create data models and interactive reports in Excel. You publish, share and consume these models and interactive reports online on your company’s own BI Site. This is relatively simple to do, and either Compete366 can train you how to do this yourself, or we can do it for you.
Power BI integrates with all your other Microsoft products seamlessly to give a great productivity experience, and makes it very simple to use.
