Like many events during the pandemic, this year’s Gartner Analytics and BI Bake-Off conference was held online. During the event leading BI vendors showcased their products’ storytelling capabilities. Power BI was among the leaders.
Gartner’s Bake-Offs are popular informative sessions in which leading BI vendors show off their data exploration, analysis, and visualization skills. Justyna Lucznik represented the Power BI team in the showdown against Microsoft’s main rivals in the industry – Tableau, Qlik, and SAP.
A month before the event, the participants received a dataset to explore. After that during the event the teams displayed their findings in a side-by-side comparison. This year, the World Health Organization (WHO) provided a dataset for the conference.
One of the key objectives of the conference is to promote data literacy and show everyone that data can be exciting. By showing the reports, each profound and insightful in their own way, the BI vendors push the values of curiosity, exploration and analytical thinking.
“Power BI is actually all about improving data literacy. That’s our mission statement,” Luchnik said.
The Power BI program manager said the main idea behind Power BI (and other BI vendors) is really about replacing opinions with facts and promoting a data-driven culture.
Storytelling is the new language of success in BI
In the world full of information, data visualization has become a key for success. You can have the best dataset, complex calculations, automation and AI features. However, if you cannot clearly communicate the ideas behind the numbers, your work is essentially useless. At the end of the day, stories move people and inspire action not the numbers in a spreadsheet.
That is why, leading BI vendors are increasingly focusing on improving visualization, UX and storytelling capabilities of their products.
In the recent years, Power BI has become a complete BI tool, which combines the power of analytics and the art of visualization. Using Power BI, you can identify a problem, get data, find key insights and then explain them to anyone.
Check out Justyna’s presentation during this year’s Bake-Off below: