Business Intelligence top tips

Start small and grow

PowerBI is incredibly powerful and in time you're likely to end up with many, many reports which deliver insights across your whole organisation. But, don't be tempted to try to initially specify every report you think you'll need. You'll end up developing lots of reports that you don't actually need, and missing out on many that you do, and it's a project that may never start, let alone finish. Better to start with a core set of reports that are currently time consuming to produce manually, and look for some exciting new insights to prove the value of PowerBI and grow from there over time as business needs change.

PowerBI Desktop for single users is free! But, you need Pro if you're going to share securely

It's amazing that PowerBI Desktop is completely free! For a single user who might only need to share static reports in PDF format it's great, but you will need PowerBI Pro licensing for all users who are consuming reports if you want those reports to remain interactive, and secure. Don't be tempted to use the Publish to Web feature in PowerBI Desktop, as this makes your report available publicly. Even Microsoft have a big warning in their documentation about this, and it has been the cause of several major data breaches around the world.

Multiple data sources

Take advantage of PowerBI's ability to bring together multiple different data sources, such as Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint lists, SQL databases and data from cloud systems with an API. The real power comes from linking data sources in your model and then manipulating them to allow you, or your users, to produce the reports you need.

Build a good data model, following best practice, as early mistakes can come back to haunt you later

PowerBI makes it easy to bring together lots of data from different sources and manipulate it, but this isn't without risks. Building on top of a good model will make life easier as the amount of data, and different sources grow. Fundamental mistakes early on can result in performance issues, errors, complex management or even situations where it becomes nearly impossible to produce the reports you want in the future. Make sure you're investing in a solid data model, built on solid foundations and best practice, and get help from experts if you need it.

Consider security of the data

Is it appropriate for everyone to see all of the data? If not, there are various different ways to keep data secure. With the PowerBI service, which is part of the PowerBI Pro license, workspaces and reports can be shared with specific users or groups using Microsoft 365 permissions. You can even restrict access down to specific rows of data, so for example, although your data model contains all of the data, users from different departments can only see their data.

Not everyone processes data the way you do!

Consider the audience for your reports, you might be very visual and love colourful high-level bar charts, but some prefer information in tabular format so they can see the detail. There's no reason you can't create reports with the same data shown in multiple ways for different audiences! Don't be offended when you show someone your beautiful, vibrant, colourful charts, only for them to ask if they could have a table. You can still use some sophisiticated conditional formatting of the data to bring it to life!