What Can You Do with Power BI?

Thinking about using Microsoft Power BI but not quite sure what it does? You're in the right place. Power BI is an incredibly versatile tool that transforms raw, messy data from different sources into clean, interactive, and shareable reports. This guide breaks down exactly what you can do with it, from connecting your first data source to automating your weekly reporting.

What is Power BI, Exactly?

At its core, Power BI is Microsoft's collection of software, apps, and services created for business intelligence. The goal is simple: to help you make better decisions by giving you a clear, data-backed picture of what's happening in your business. It bridges the gap between chaotic spreadsheets and crystal-clear insights.

Power BI isn't just one thing. It's a suite of products that work together:

• Power BI Desktop: A free Windows application where you do the heavy lifting - connecting to data, cleaning it up, creating data models, and designing your reports with charts and graphs.
• Power BI Service: The cloud-based (SaaS) component where you publish and share your reports, create dashboards, and collaborate with your team. This is where others will view and interact with your work.
• Power BI Mobile: Apps for phones and tablets (iOS and Android) that let you securely access and view your live dashboards and reports from anywhere.

Together, these elements let you pull your data from all corners of your business and centralize it into a single, reliable source of truth.

Connect to Virtually Any Data Source

Most businesses don't have all their data in one neat place. Your website traffic is in Google Analytics, your sales numbers are in Shopify or Salesforce, your ad spend is on Facebook and Google Ads, and you probably have a dozen essential Excel spreadsheets floating around. This is where Power BI first shows its strength.

It comes with a massive library of built-in connectors that make it easy to pull in data from hundreds of on-premise and cloud-based sources, including:

• Files: Excel workbooks, CSV files, XML, JSON, text files, and even entire folders of documents.
• Databases: SQL Server, Oracle Database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SAP HANA, and many more.
• SaaS Platforms: Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mailchimp, and other popular business applications.
• Azure Services: Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage, etc.
• Web Sources: You can even pull data directly from web pages, like tables found in a Wikipedia article or an online report.

The ability to connect all of these disparate sources is the first step toward getting a complete view of your entire business. Instead of logging into five different platforms to see what’s going on, you can bring it all together under one roof.

Clean and Transform Your Data

Raw data is rarely ready for reporting. It's often filled with typos, missing values, inconsistent formatting, and extra columns that just get in the way. Before you can visualize anything, you need to clean it up. Power BI handles this with an incredibly powerful tool called the Power Query Editor.

Think of Power Query as a dedicated workbench just for prepping your data. It's where you can:

• Remove errors: Get rid of blank rows and columns that clutter your dataset.
• Change data types: Convert text that should be a number (like "1,000") or a date formatted as a simple string into the correct format.
• Split columns: Take a column with a full name (e.g., "John Smith") and easily split it into "First Name" and "Last Name" columns.
• Merge and append queries: Combine data from multiple tables. For instance, you could merge monthly sales reports from January, February, and March into a single, comprehensive table for Q1.
• Pivot and unpivot data: Restructure your data to make it easier to analyze, changing it from a wide format to a tall, relational format.

The best part? Every action you take in the Power Query Editor is recorded as a step. When you refresh your data, Power BI automatically reapplies all those same steps to the new data, saving you from tedious manual clean-up work forever.

Build Data Models for Deeper Insights

Once your data is clean, you can start creating a data model. This sounds technical, but the concept is straightforward: it’s about creating meaningful relationships between your different datasets. This is where Power BI really leaves simple spreadsheets behind.

Imagine you have two tables:

1. A Sales table with ProductID, OrderDate, and SaleAmount.
2. A Products table with ProductID, ProductName, and ProductCategory.

By themselves, they only tell a partial story. But by creating a relationship between the two tables on the ProductID column, you can start asking much more interesting questions. You'll be able to create a chart showing your total sales broken down by Product Category - an insight that would have required a bunch of VLOOKUPs in Excel.

At the heart of the data model is DAX (Data Analysis Expressions). DAX is the formula language used in Power BI. If you're familiar with Excel formulas, you'll feel a sense of familiarity, but DAX is significantly more powerful. With DAX, you can create new columns and measures (calculations) that don't exist in your original data, like:

• Year-over-year sales growth
• Running totals for inventory
• Average customer lifetime value

For example, a simple DAX formula to calculate total revenue could look like this:

Total Revenue = SUM(Sales[SaleAmount])

This allows you to add sophisticated, business-specific logic to your reports.

Create Stunning, Interactive Visualizations

This is what Power BI is most famous for. After connecting, cleaning, and modeling your data, you can finally bring it to life through beautiful and, most importantly, interactive dashboards and reports.

The drag-and-drop report builder in Power BI Desktop makes it simple to create a wide variety of visualizations:

• Traditional Charts: Area charts, bar charts, column charts, line charts, and pie charts.
• Maps: Use geographic data to show performance by country, state, or even city.
• Tables and Matrices: Similar to pivot tables in Excel, allowing you to summarize data in a structured format.
• Cards and KPIs: Highlight single, important numbers like total revenue or conversion rate.
• Advanced Visuals: Treemaps, waterfalls, funnels, gauges, and scatter plots.

The interactivity is where the magic happens. When you build a report with multiple charts, they are all connected by default. Clicking on a specific bar in one chart (e.g., the "USA" bar in a "Sales by Country" chart) will instantly filter every other visual on the page to show you data related only to the USA. This allows you and your team to explore the data dynamically, uncovering patterns and drilling down into specific details without needing to build dozens of different reports.

Share Reports and Collaborate in Real-Time

A report isn't useful if you can't share it. Once you’ve built your report in Power BI Desktop, you publish it to the Power BI Service. This moves it to the cloud, making it accessible to anyone you've given permission to.

Collaboration features in the Power BI Service include:

• Dashboards: Create a single-page overview that compiles the most important visuals from multiple reports. This provides a high-level, at-a-glance view of your key metrics.
• Workspaces: Create dedicated spaces where your team can collaborate on building and managing a collection of reports and dashboards.
• Secure Sharing: You can share reports with individuals inside or outside your organization, controlling whether they can view, edit, or reshare the content. You can even implement row-level security to ensure a sales rep, for example, only sees data related to their own accounts.
• Comments & Subscriptions: You and your team can comment directly on visualizations to discuss findings. You can also subscribe to reports and receive a daily or weekly email snapshot right in your inbox.

Automate Your Reporting

Remember that repetitive cycle of downloading CSVs, cleaning them up, and pasting new data into a spreadsheet every Monday morning? Power BI automates this entire process. In the Power BI Service, you can set up a scheduled refresh for your datasets. You can have your data update daily, weekly, or even multiple times a day (depending on your license).

Once configured, Power BI will automatically connect to your original data sources (your SQL database, Shopify account, Excel file on SharePoint, etc.), pull in the latest information, re-apply all your data cleaning steps from Power Query, recalculate your measures, and update all the visualizations in your reports. Your stakeholders will always be looking at the most current numbers without you lifting a finger.

Final Thoughts

Power BI is an end-to-end analytics platform that lets you do everything from combining disparate spreadsheet files to building enterprise-level, automated reporting solutions. It empowers your team to move beyond static reports and explore data in an interactive way, turning curiosity into clear, actionable insights.

While Power BI is incredibly comprehensive, mastering its many layers - from Power Query to DAX - demands a significant time investment. For marketing and sales teams who need to prove ROI without becoming data engineers, a faster path is often required. That’s why we built Graphed . It lets you connect all your marketing and sales data sources in seconds and create live dashboards just by asking questions like "Show me a comparison of Facebook Ads spend versus Shopify revenue by campaign." We automate the entire setup so you can get straight to the insights.