Power BI is an Analytics and Business Intelligence platform. Users work with data tables, establish relationships, improve them with formulas, prepare reports, aggregate and present the data with visualisations. Power BI Service is an extension that allows working on the cloud and presenting data online through websites and mobile platforms.
Excel is a spreadsheet software with robust features that evolved through decades for financial reporting and modelling. Power Pivot brought mass data analysis capabilities to Excel supported with its presentation features.
Professionals working with data and doing these operations in a recurring manner develop a sense of automation; they want the systems and software to do more of the work for them. All the tools we worked with in this workshop supports a level of automation; you do not do the same things you have done in the first run.
Both Excel and Power BI have features enabling automation for improving the workflow on analytics and business intelligence. The process of building reports, dashboards and visuals already has a level of automation; all the actions from loading the tables, adjusting them for analysis, the reports and visuals are set up one time and reused with new data.
In this part of the workshop, we will run 3 processes:
- We will reuse the Power BI file we prepared for 2019, but this time we will use the year 2020 data. We will replace the data tables of the 2019 database with 2020 tables.
- We will also prepare the Excel reports with the flat file we get from Power BI 2020 file.
- We will make a direct connection to PostgreSQL. This part is to simulate connecting Power BI to a system/database to automate the analysis and presentation.
In this part we will analyse 2020 results with Power BI, then run the 2020 reports on Excel and finally connect Power BI with PostgreSQL to analyse 2019 and 2020 results and have a look at the AI features.