Ultimate Guide to Getting the most of your Power BI implementation

Why is this the ultimate guide to Power BI

At a point in time, where you can learn anything within a few hours by watching videos, we're calling this guide the 'ultimate guide' - because we've included a few things that aren’t possible to learn in just a few hours. With our experts, we've curated this Power BI guide for you to understand all there is right from choosing the right Power BI license to even designing the best dashboards.

Caution: Power BI Ahead! (Proceed at Your Own Risk) Prepare to become a data overlord and make your Excel-loving colleagues green with envy

Of all the questions we answer as Power BI implementation partners, the most asked one is that why should we upgrade if Power BI desktop is free? While it is true that creating reports is free with Power BI Desktop (Now Microsoft Fabric free account), Microsoft charges for:

• Publishing and sharing reports with other users
• Better Infrastructure wrt data model sizes, capacity, refresh rates, and access to workspaces
• Integration and access to other applications like AI, ML, data marts, real-time analytics
• Access to One Lake storage, networking, One Lake cache, and more..

So, if you want to leverage Power BI beyond personal use i.e. create dashboards for larger datasets, use their robust tools, and share it with others, then you might have to choose between Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium, Power BI Embedded or any of the Microsoft Fabric types (which has Power BI included in it).

P.S. You are charged for the capacity and the users i.e. user based - paid as per the number of users or capacity based - paid as per the capacity nodes. It is calculated by:

Capacity Units: These are the dedicated set of resources reserved to handle various workloads. It denotes the computational power available for your chosen capacity.

v-cores or Virtual Cores: Changed after 2022, the unified v-cores represents the virtual cores assigned to the capacities in both front and back end.

We'll elaborate more on this in just a while. For now, your goal might be to create a dashboard like this:

Power BI Dashboard Sample: A Commercial Dashboard for Sales Users

And to create this with the best possible implementation processes. That's what we aim to do today.

• Help you identify the best Power BI type for you
• Get started with a fool-proof 100 day implementation strategy
• Tips to create dashboards like the one above (including the types of visualizations you need to select)
• And taking it just beyond dashboards!

So let's get into it!

Types of Power BI licenses

After the addition of Fabric SKUs, there are now 4 types of SKUs, you might come across while dealing with Power BI namely: EM, A, P, (collectively Microsoft SKUs) and F (Azure SKUs) type. You might need to select an SKU based on the type of you solution you want deployed out of Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium, Power BI Embedded or Microsoft Fabric.

For both Premium per capacity and Embedded users (i.e. all the SKUs we mentioned above), the pricing is usually dependent on the number of cores and capacity units you need.

Choosing between the licenses - What's right for you

Every license has a different driver and use. Power BI free is for someone who's trying to get started with it. Pro is for the teams who want to start sharing their reports, Premium per user for teams who want to share larger datasets extensively and Premium per capacity is when you want more capabilities like larger data limits, storage,etc. Power BI embedded is useful when you want to share your Power BI app access to external users or large set of audience without having to buy many Power BI licenses. The gist is summarized below:

Well, now you must have decided on the type of license you would need. Next what?

How should the Power BI implementation be? With our Agile implementation framework, we make sure that Power BI is integrated while ensuring enough 'change' practices

Congratulations for taking a step towards building a data culture in your organization with Power BI. You might be at a place where you want to know how to get started with Power BI or Microsoft Fabric. Then this can be your compass to direct you on a path to be taken. Though we’re labelling it the first 100 days, this is an approximation – the actual number of days would be decided based on the complexity of implementation you would need. We'll take you through this without 6-step agile framework.

Agile is not just a framework- it is an attitude. Getting started with it needs dedication and adherence to the 'change'. It is due to a lack of such processes that upto 87% of analytics projects fail.

Our 6-step Agile frame work as you can see in the image, is broken down into:

• Prepare phase
• Foundational phase
• Implementation phase
• Testing phase
• Deployment phase
• Post- deployment training

Let's discuss the gist of these steps and how we start with them next.

The 6-step agile Power BI implementation roadmap

Catch our the entire framework here

Maturity levels in Organizational adoption

Usually, it is difficult to measure where you stand and where do you want to move forward. But with Power BI adoption with the below levels, you can clearly understand where you stand.

This can help you pave the way forward to create a data-driven organization. But remember, data analytics or data visualization is a marathon - by breaking it down into sprints, you can make it seem easier and achievable.

Stories are everywhere.

Be it watching something on the news or reading it in a book or telling your own one. We listen to them every day. But what makes these stories compelling?

The Data, The Narrative, and The Visuals

Depending on whether the data is categorical, ordinal, or continuous you'll need to think about representing data in different fashion

You'd want the narrative to have a:

Building a compelling narrative: Here's a cheat sheet for finding how it would work best

Choosing the right Power BI chart type for your dashboard:

To understand what kind of charts to use you'll need to think about the data and how you want to represent it. Some of the questions that would help:

• How large is the volume of data?
• Whether there is a component of time?
• If it is important to show the spread or distribution of data?
• Is there any standalone data?
• Is there a need to show comparisons or relationships?
• Should the data be represented as proportions or percentages?

The additional parameters that would be needed to consider in addition is how you want to represent the data like the ones below:

Dashboard-ing and Data Storytelling best Practices

We've covered in detail about the methods, the processes, what to do and what not to do w.r.t. dashboards and data visualization in our ebook, you can check it out to know more. Now let's take look at the best practices for data storytelling & visualization.

• Understand the data literacy level of your audience
• Consider Prior Knowledge, Priorities, and Constraints
• Use Label axes, and titles & context appropriately
• Keep in mind design concepts like Proximity, Similarity, and Enclosure
• Flow and placement of data ( F type layout works best)
• Don't over color the dashboards
• Test Dashboards early
• Avoid data clutter

Also, though most people love pie chars and bar charts, it don't fall into the 'conundrum' of using them repeatedly, you can look at the alternatives to represent data better

We've made the dashboards.. But facing data integration challenges? If this is a question that is on your mind now or you think would come later. Microsoft has a solution for you.. Fabric

Microsoft Fabric serves as an all-in-one analytics platform that combines multiple of its existing services like Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, and Power BI with new services like Data Activator and One Lake.

What's the benefit this would provide?

Some of the benefits include: access to a unified data platform, centralized data repository with OneLake, integration with Azure Open AI services (Co-pilot), user-friendly integrations, reduced costs due to reduced tech stack maintenance, etc. According to the Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Fabric, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, the benefits include:

• 254%-420% projected return on investment over three years
• Up to 50% increase in data engineer and data scientist productivity
• $500K-$1.2m in enhanced business results due to better insights
• $660K-$1m reduced costs of security, governance and compliance
• $1.1m saved due to eliminated spending on current solutions

Source: Azure

What does this mean for Power BI Users?

For existing Power BI users or for anyone who wants to explore Fabric, you'll have to keep these things in mind:

• In addition to compute costs, users must also consider storage expenses. Data is stored in OneLake, with costs currently starting around $0.023 per GB per month
• You get Co-pilot with Power BI to explore data, identify key trends, and create compelling visualizations
• If your primary need is just a visualization tool, having Power BI is most likely enough.
• To share and collaborate on Microsoft Fabric, you might need to have an F64 license, and at least one per-user license

In case you're looking for a licensing guide with Fabric details, then check out our Power BI licensing guide

Please note: Fabric Pricing would change according to the geographies and the Capacity units chosen

Though most of what's written above is more relevant for new Power BI users- it is also something users looking to migrate to Power BI must consider.

As Microsoft Partners, we ensure effective migration by carefully considering the following:

• Tenant or on-premise location of source data for ensuring reporting goes on after migration
• Figuring out gateways (shared or user) for target tenant
• Updating source data connections
• Check need for API-level access for workbooks
• Type of workspace - shared or personal for reports

Some of the benefits our clients have seen due to migrating to Power BI are:

Share our short Migration guide to Power BI

What's next?

Get your hands dirty and get started with Power BI desktop. But if you're looking for someone who can guide you through this journey right from inception or if you're looking into Fabric - drop us a message and our Microsoft experts will get back to you.

Further Reading