Exploring Power BI Components and Functionalities

In today's data-driven world, organizations are constantly seeking effective ways to analyze and visualize their data to gain valuable insights. Power BI a powerful business intelligence tool developed by Microsoft has emerged as a game-changer in the field of data visualization. Power BI makes it simple to connect to your data sources, view the data, identify the key information, and share it with whoever you choose.

Power BI offers several components and functionalities that can be particularly beneficial for non-profit organizations in their data analysis and reporting needs. Let's explore the different components and their functionalities in the context of non-profit organizations:

• Power BI Desktop: Power BI Desktop provides non-profit organizations with a powerful tool to connect, transform, and visualize their data. It allows you to consolidate data from various sources such as fundraising platforms, donor databases, volunteer management systems, and financial systems. With Power BI Desktop, you can create interactive dashboards and reports to gain insights into donation trends, fundraising effectiveness, program impact, and other key metrics specific to your organization's mission. 

         The key activities carried out in Power BI Desktop are:
             • Connecting with your data
             • Data cleansing and transformation
             • Creating data models
             • Creating reports.

Installing Power BI Desktop 

• Power BI Desktop can be downloaded and installed as a standard executable package: see Power BI Desktop—Interactive Reports | Microsoft Power BI.
• However, since the product is updated every month, the latest version will need to be manually downloaded and installed each month. 
•  Power BI Desktop can also be installed as a Windows app from the Microsoft store. 
•  The key benefit of installing Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft store is that the product will be automatically updated every month. 

         For more information on please visit: What is Power BI Desktop? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

• Power BI Service (Power BI Online): Power BI Service is a cloud-based platform that enables non-profit organizations to share and collaborate on reports and dashboards. It allows you to publish your Power BI reports securely and share them with stakeholders such as board members, donors, and volunteers. Power BI Service also provides the ability to schedule data refresh, ensuring that your reports are always up to date. Additionally, you can use features like Q&A to allow stakeholders to ask natural language questions about your data and receive instant answers.

          Editing Reports in the Power BI Service
                 • It is also possible to edit reports in the Power BI service.
              

          For more information on please visit: Tutorial: Get started creating in the Power BI service - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

• Power BI Mobile: Power BI Mobile allows non-profit professionals to access their reports and dashboards on mobile devices while on the go. This can be particularly useful for staff members who are working in the field, attending events, or visiting project sites. With Power BI Mobile, you can monitor real-time data, track progress, and make informed decisions based on the latest insights, ensuring that you stay connected to your organization's data no matter where you are. 

         For more information on please visit: What are the Power BI mobile apps? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

• Power BI Report Server: Power BI Report Server is an on-premises solution that allows organizations to host and distribute Power BI reports within their own network infrastructure. It offers similar capabilities to Power BI Service, but the reports and data remain within the organization's environment, providing more control and security.

        For more information on please visit: What is Power BI Report Server? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

• Power BI Gateway: For non-profit organizations that have on-premises data sources or databases, Power BI Gateway enables secure connectivity and data refresh between Power BI Service and the organization's internal systems. This ensures that you can incorporate data from your donor management systems, CRM software, or other internal databases into your Power BI reports and dashboards, providing a comprehensive view of your organization's operations and performance. 

       For more information on please visit: On-premises data gateway - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

• Power BI Embedded: Power BI Embedded allows non-profit organizations to embed Power BI reports and dashboards directly into their websites or applications. Power BI Embedded allows you to include or embed Power BI reports and dashboards in your own applications (Websites, Portals, CRMs, etc). In addition, it maintains the features of visual analysis and its powerful functionalities. Mainly for software providers, developers or companies that wish to embed reports and dashboards in applications, portals, websites. This feature can be leveraged to provide interactive data visualizations to your website visitors, donors, or program beneficiaries. You can create customized dashboards that highlight your organization's impact, showcase donor contributions, or visualize program outcomes, enhancing transparency and engagement with your stakeholders. 

               For more information on please visit: Power BI embedded analytics overview - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

• Power BI AppSource: Non-profit organizations can explore Power BI AppSource, an online marketplace for finding and downloading pre-built Power BI content packs, templates, and visuals. AppSource offers a range of industry-specific solutions, including non-profit-specific templates, which can help accelerate your reporting and analysis by providing ready-to-use dashboards and reports tailored to the unique needs of non-profit organizations. For more information on please visit: Business Apps – Microsoft AppSource.

• Data Sources 

  Data Sources of Power BI are the sources from which data are collected either by importing them or by planting a live service to get the data. Some of the Power BI data sources supported by Power BI include: 

  • File Types like JSON, XML, Excel, txt/CSV, and other Share point folder type files are all supported by Power BI. 
  • Components of Azure like Azure SQL Database, Azure Table Storage, Azure Analysis Services Database (Beta), and many more are all also accepted by Power BI. 
  • Online Services like SharePoint Online List, Power BI Service, Microsoft Exchange Online, Dynamics 365 (online), Salesforce reports, and many more. 
  • Databases of SQL Server Analysis Services, Sybase, Google BidQuery, Snowflake, Oracle, Access, and many more. 

   

• Power Pivot: With Power Pivot you can work with large data sets, build extensive relationships, and create complex (or simple) calculations, all in a high-performance environment, and all within the familiar experience of Excel. Power Pivot is data modeling technology that lets you create data models, establish relationships, and create calculations. 

• Power View: Power View is a data visualization technology that lets you create interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals that bring your data to life.

• Power Query: Power Query allows you to import data from many different sources and then clean, transform and reshape your data as needed. Power BI imports data from Excel and a variety of other sources. Power Query allows you to search data from various sources such as social media websites, big data, open data, and so on. It also helps in converting this data into an Excel-readable format so that actions such as column or row merging, renaming column title, changing data types etc. can be performed in Excel. This data can then be simply imported into Power BI. 

By utilizing these different components and functionalities of Power BI, non-profit organizations can gain deeper insights into their operations, optimize fundraising efforts, measure program effectiveness, and effectively communicate their impact to stakeholders. Power BI's data visualization capabilities combined with the ability to connect to various data sources make it a valuable tool for non-profit professionals to make data-driven decisions and drive positive change in their communities.

Thank you for reading!