Power BI and SharePoint: How the integration works and its benefits
The integration between Power BI and SharePoint can enable seamless data access, analytics, and visualization with custom automations and flows.
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that allows users to understand, analyze, and interpret business data better and faster than traditional graphs and charts. Power BI users create simple or complex dashboards, interactive reports, and visualizations, making the tool especially useful for salespeople, analysts, IT professionals, developers, and enterprise leaders.
Users can go from examining data to gathering insights from it in a matter of minutes by connecting sources, processing the data, and displaying the outcomes in highly visually appealing reports. Power BI allows users to draw rich insights for a wide range of scenarios thanks to links to a wide range of data sources and types that are continually growing.
Advantages of Power BI and SharePoint integration
SharePoint, available as a cloud-based platform in the form of SharePoint Online, plays an important role in helping Microsoft users manage and access their data. It’s a solution that’s been created with all Microsoft users in mind and that unifies different enterprise processes and documents.
Data collection and analysis aren’t the only things Power BI can do. It also helps present different groups of data as a report, employing visual representations to break down raw information into easy-to-understand insights for employees and decision-makers. Users only get static reports when using SharePoint as a standalone platform. But when connected to Power BI, SharePoint allows users to create dynamic dashboards with real-time data and custom visualizations.
Users of Power BI can share live dashboards with everyone in the business. Some of the Power BI dashboard examples include sales reports, customer analytics, global retail analytics dashboards, etc. This way, managers and business heads can see how end-users are using the SharePoint portal with the help of Power BI. When it comes to quickly retrieve information from SharePoint, Excel, Salesforce, and other platforms and applications, this tool can be really beneficial. Here’s how:
- Integration with non-Microsoft solutions: Integrating Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms to SharePoint and Power BI will make your data more accessible. Power BI connects to 60 popular software packages, most of which are used widely in many mid-sized and large enterprises. For starters, platforms like Spark, Google Analytics, SAP, and Salesforce can be used to pull data into a unified dashboard. At the same time, cloud servers and hybrid systems have access to your data so you don’t need to worry about storing it on devices.
- API key generation: Installation is straightforward, requiring little to no engineering or IT expertise. Admins can easily generate an API key and put it into the software; this is especially convenient if your company currently uses Microsoft platforms.
- Access control and security: By using Active Directory to set it up, it provides powerful access control and security. Admins can also control which team members have access to specific rows of data on reports based on the position of the employee. Executives, for example, have access to the entire SharePoint reporting data, whereas salespeople only have access to the top ten rows. This saves time by allowing you to create a single report for everyone.
- Ease of user adoption: The learning curve for Power BI is straightforward. The UI components for ease of user adoption will be familiar to anyone familiar with Microsoft products. It’s also simple to export data to other systems like Excel, giving users the freedom to work with their data in different environments as needed. Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups are both easily integrated with Power BI.
Power BI is fast becoming one of the most popular reporting tools given that it is part of the Microsoft enterprise suite and integrates with data types from both Microsoft and third-party sources. This demonstrates that SharePoint development services will continue to be a popular choice among businesses in the future, while its integration with solutions like Power BI and Power Automate can enable and help scale automation and seamless data reporting and visualizations for businesses of all sizes.
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