With the release of Power BI and Power BI Premium for capacity planning, Microsoft is really pushing its boundaries in BI. In this article, we will look into several points that we should consider during our Power BI report development.
BI tool helps a person to get insights of data that is already captured. It’s a great tool for visualizing our data. Power BI is not technology but it's a Business Intelligence tool. So, we need to understand where Power BI stands in Data processing.
So, first, let’s take quick look at Date Warehousing and ETL process -
In our day to day activities, tons of data is collected and processed from heterogeneous sources. This data can be in any format, it might be in e-mail, document, may be from OLTP systems etc. We cannot ensure if the data that is being collected is accurate and error-less. So, the data collected from different sources passes to ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process and creates Date Warehouse and Data Mart and typically creates OLAP cubes.
These data warehouses/marts/cubes reveal patterns and trends of data over a period of time. This data helps decision makers and stake holders to make accurate decisions based on the data that has already been analyzed and recorded by the different systems. Now, this is the point where BI tools, such as Microsoft Power BI come into picture. Using BI tools, we can represent our data in graphical format using different techniques such as histograms, map, pie chart, clustered chart etc.
Basically, BI tool is placed on top of the data processing/warehousing concept. We can develop Power BI report from the data consumed from various sources, using Power BI for Desktop. Before we jump into report development, there are several points that we should consider.
Whether it is report development or any application/system development, the very first thing we should determine during our work is the audience that will be utilizing our report/application.
As per my opinion, if you are not aware of your target audience, then you might miss your goal of delivering right and productive information. We also need to understand the mentality of our viewers/audience, we need to understand -
How they want to organize the report and how they want to see the report?
What are the main/major areas that people are interested to see in report?
Once we are aware of this information, we should start with analyzing our data source. Rather than importing the entire data set in Power BI, we should identify the typical information that our viewer wants to see and based on that, we can create database queries to retrieve only that part of data.
Once we are ready with our data/source, we are ready to develop our report. In this phase, we should understand the use of each Power BI visual and its capabilities. Sometimes, during report development, we make one mistake, that is, we are putting/organizing same information in different visuals, which does not make sense.
Aim of our report should be to give right, consistent, and necessary information to user at glance and this will be possible only if our report is well organized.
Use drill down feature where it is necessary but do not use this feature frequently in your report. In drill down, we can filter our data using different inter-related parameters.
There is no doubt that drill down is an added advantage in our report but also, it makes our report a bit difficult in regards of getting right information at first look and filtering our information effectively. Yes, this sentence might be wrong under certain circumstances.
Use of space and color also plays vital role. If our visuals are not in correct logical order, then it might be difficult for users to get the right data. Here, what I think is that we should keep visuals on top that are intended to provide filtering capabilities to our data. And the visual that is the main part of the report, should be placed just after the filters with appropriate size and fonts.
Sometimes, we prepare reports giving “to the point” information but due to incorrect logical order of the visuals and color scheme, it may create a negative impression on users. So, UI does impose a heavy impact on our report.
I hope, this article might be useful for you in your future Power BI development.