What Power BI Is and Where It Fits

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) platform. Business intelligence means turning raw business data into information that people use to make decisions. Power BI connects to data, cleans it, links tables together, calculates measures, and shows the results as interactive reports that others can open in a browser, in Microsoft Teams or on a phone.

This course is for people who already work with data in spreadsheets and now need to build reliable reports and dashboards in Power BI: analysts, finance and operations staff, HSE and quality coordinators, and team leaders who own a monthly report. It is an intermediate course. You should already be comfortable with tables, filters and pivot tables. If you are not, start with the Spreadsheets for Business course.

The course teaches the tool. It is not preparation for a Microsoft certification exam and it does not award any Microsoft certification.

Semantic model, report and dashboard

Three words cause most confusion for new users, so learn them precisely.

• A semantic model is the data, the relationships between tables and the calculations. Older versions of Power BI called it a dataset, and you will still see that word in older guides. One semantic model can feed many reports.
• A report is one or more pages of interactive visuals built on one semantic model. Readers can filter, drill and hover.
• A dashboard, in the strict Power BI sense, is a single page created only in the service by pinning tiles from one or more reports. It is a summary that links back to the reports.

In everyday speech, people call any summary report page a “dashboard”. In this course, “dashboard” means a summary page designed for quick monitoring, and “Power BI dashboard” means the pinned-tile object in the service when the difference matters.

Where Power BI fits beside other tools

A spreadsheet is excellent for one-off analysis, models and lists that people type into. Power BI is better when the same report must be refreshed every day or month from the same sources, shared with many people, and secured so each reader sees only their own data. A database stores and protects the data; Power BI reads from it and does not replace it.

Example. A logistics company produces a weekly delivery report by copying five exports into one workbook every Monday. It takes half a day and errors creep in. In Power BI the five exports are connected once, the cleaning steps are recorded, and the Monday report refreshes itself.