In our last week article, we looked at Power BI’s new upcoming visual, smart narratives, which will be a big help for management reporting.
However, it was not only the smart narratives visual that caught our attention; with the latest Power BI platform upgrade, Microsoft has taken big steps toward promoting and helping companies to develop data-driven culture.
During the last week Business Applications Summit (MBAS), Microsoft demonstrated that it is working to create its own eco-system, in which different Microsoft tools will be effectively working together to create a full data experience for all users.
Indeed, the development of data-driven culture within companies was the major theme at MBAS. A special interest was given to the development of AI and augmented intelligence capabilities within the Power BI platform.
Power BI as leading self-service BI tool
The idea is to promote the use of BI within enterprises by integrating its analytics features into other Microsoft tools, such as Excel, Teams and other Office products. In this scenario, Power BI and its improved embedded intelligence capabilities may serve as a wrap that helps to tie everything together. Considering the already existing popularity of Power BI and its growing community, Microsoft is taking the right steps.
“All of these announcements are important steps that Microsoft is taking to further cement themselves as leaders in this space… They’re further empowering all users to effectively bring data to their jobs on their terms,” TechTarget cited Mike Leone, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
Embedded BI, which is the integration of self-service BI tools into other Microsoft business applications, enhances user experience by providing beautiful visualizations, real-time analytics and interactive reporting. With Power BI, business users enjoy the ability to access and analyze data in one place without having to open other tools. Embedded BI reduces the time spent switching between different applications and analytics tools, providing more insights and increasing a workflow.
Besides the smart narratives visual, other significant Power BI updates include new enterprise semantic modeling capabilities, including shared and certified data sets, which can be a big help for users when building reports; the PowerPoint for Data feature, which provides pre-built templates for report layouts just like when building slides in PowerPoint; and the ability to connect to Power BI data straight from Excel.
With all these new updates taking place, Microsoft is staking its claim as one of the clear leaders in the big data and analytics field.