Is it even possible to fall in love with some software? According to the 2013 Spike Jonze file ‘Her’, yes it is. Ok, maybe calling it love is taking it too far, but it’s fair to say that I do think Power BI is ace. Why? Well the answer is multi-faceted.
As the unrivaled leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence, why would your head ever be turned by any other BI product?
Certainly one of the first reasons is it’s accessibility. This falls into a few categories. The fact that Power BI desktop is completely free is fantastic. But I guess what I also mean about accessibility is the fact that Power BI can make Business Intelligence Enterprise fundamentals readily accessible by non IT folk. In Power BI you’re being presented with a fully fledged ETL tool as well as a leading visualisation tool. And even if you’re just messing about locally on a laptop, you’re encouraged to adopt the kind of practices that enterprise solution architects would be thinking about. For example, my first forays into wanting to do ‘proper’ business intelligence, in the days where no one would yet let me anywhere near an actual database, I was able to use Power Pivot to experiment with the concepts I’d read about in Kimball’s books, experimenting with creating dimensional models. Power BI is a modern day facilitator for a gateway into a Business Intelligence career.
Then there’s the huge variety available in the Power BI space. It’s actually getting harder and harder to be an expert in the entire Power BI ecosystem. There are areas and niches that you can decide to really specialize in. You can decide that you want to be an ETL wiz and spend all your time going deep with M Code. Or maybe it’s understanding DAX and the way the Vertipaq engine works. You can flex your techy muscles going deep with these languages, but then there’s also the chance to be creative and innovative with the presentation and navigation options available with report designing elements. There seems to be a growing movement at the moment around governance and administration of Power BI tenants, and there are loads of opportunity to go deep on things like the Power BI Service APIs and tenant administration settings too.
And even if you do invest the time to conquer any one of these specialisms, Power BI evolves so quickly that there will always be the next new feature around the corner that will give you the opportunity for further learning. If you like immersing yourself in a given technology, it seems that the opportunities with Power BI are genuinely endless.
Lastly, as cliched as it is, the community around Power BI is absolutely one of my favourite things. I interact regularly on Twitter and Reddit with a bunch of like minded Power BI fanatics, and one of the highlights of my week is undoubtedly taking part in the Guy In A Cube livestream. The eagerness to reach out and assist and help to educate Power BI’ers of all levels of experience and ability is a really great thing to be a part of, but even the non-PBI side of this is really touching to observe, and you often see people reaching out with moral support or advice around other elements of life. The Power BI family are a genuinely engaged and caring bunch of people.
Power BI is ace and now more than ever I feel motivated and engaged as part of that community. My infatuation for PBI is not going to be going away soon.
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