Develop Data Visualization Apps With New Features In Microsoft Power BI

Successful human interaction, and this is particularly true in business interaction, requires an exchange of information. Of course, it can also involve currency exchange or services. But before you can get to that, you first have to exchange information: what one party wants to acquire and what the other party wants in return to provide it. This is the basis of any business transaction.

Technological innovation, especially in the form of large data and the Internet of Things (IoT), has led the basic exchange of information to a new level. In business, it is not enough to know what your customer wants. Companies need to know what their customers need. With business systems collecting data to hitherto unknown quantities, the required processable information may be there, but only if the companies can extract it in a digestible form.

This is the dilemma Microsoft was trying to address at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit 2017, held in Seattle June 12-13. Through the discussion (video) and each session, Microsoft demonstrated how tools like Power BI could be used to extract, dissect and diffuse company-generated data, making the indecipherable noise into useful information. But something more subtle was also revealed at the conference.

Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft's leading data visualization tool for business intelligence. With its ability to extract data from sources ranging from global relational databases to simple Excel spreadsheets, Power BI can access data virtually anywhere and anytime. This flexibility means that users at all levels of the enterprise can use the tools found in Power BI to extract data and disseminate information that is important at the organization level.

The "democratization" of data can be a very powerful thing for a company. It can open new avenues for the exchange of information and communication. More importantly, it can reveal and open up new business opportunities that were hidden from the company before such tools became available. However, Microsoft Data Insights Summit 2017 also provided insight into the future of business communication.

The new Power BI features are transforming the toolkit from basic data visualization reporting to real application development. With the new features, a Power BI report or dashboard, if properly built, can become what is essentially an application that allows users to drill down to the underlying data with just a mouse click or finger touch. The power to tailor a report to the particular needs of a user now lies with the user and not just with an overloaded data specialist.

The days of sending a report back to adjust what information is displayed or to add more details or to reveal less details are gone. The new Power BI features mean that a single report can contain all levels of detail and let the reader decide which level to focus on. Not only does the report's creator experience the benefits of democratizing the data, but so does the reader.

Bottom line

The communication of information obtained from the data generated by a company is of vital importance for the overall success of your business. If your company can not extract and communicate processable information to decision makers from the large amount of data it generates, it will not thrive or survive. The ability to transform data into information is where companies can establish their competitive advantage.

Power BI from Microsoft and the new features introduced in Data Insights Summit 2017 can help provide your company with communication tools that transform data into actionable information. But perhaps the most important point of the conference is the understanding that data visualization has become more than just graphics and graphics. In the era of large data, data visualization and reporting are the application development platforms in which your company must dedicate resources.