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Data Visualization In Power BI: Interactive BI Reports

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Jun, 18, 2021 03:06

Data Visualization In Power BI: Interactive BI Reports

In the business world, data visualization is commonly used to deliver essential data for your team and your customers. It also helps to improve decision-making within your organization. 

What is Big data and the Importance of Big Data Visualization?

Big data is a powerful source to grow your business. Big data visualization presents data in a different graphical format to make it easier to interpret and understand. With valuable business insights, you can improve security, performance, revenue, conversions, customer experience, and business decisions using predictive analytics

Take note that analytics and interactive data visualization are crucial elements in leveraging big data. These turn big data into a useful and understandable source of valuable information for your business. There are various big data visualization tools and techniques to produce the best results. 

Importance of Big Data Visualization 

Do you want to know why big data visualization is essential for your business? Here are the reasons why. 

  • Spot trends 

Spotting trends can be challenging, especially if there are large quantities and diverse data. Fortunately, big data has effective visualizations in spotting trends. With that, you can discover opportunities for your business. 

  • Review a huge amount of data 

Big data visualization helps to review massive data and make it understandable. It allows decision-makers to understand the data quickly and make better decisions using business intelligence reports

  • Offers efficient data presentation to others 

It helps to offer others good data visual representation that is easy to understand. You can quickly convey the meaning, which may give insights to others. It is helpful for external as well as internal business presentations. 

  • Determine correlations and unexpected relationships 

Another advantage of big data visualization is it allows business users to explore data sets. So, you may discover unexpected relationships and insights. It can be done by removing or adding data sets, removing outliers, changing scales, and change visualization types. Determining unsuspected relationships and patterns in data can be an advantage for your business. 

Power BI Visuals

What are the benefits of big data visualization for an organization

Big data visualization can offer amazing benefits for an organization. These benefits include the following: 

Organizational data

Big data visualization is a great tool to provide your team with understandable historical organizational data. With this, your team can have amazing data visualization that will help them make better decisions for the growth of your business. More importantly, it can also help your employees determine the best solutions to your business’ specific problems. 

Social data

With effective visualization in action, you can have adequate social data, improving the interaction between your team and your customers. 

Sales data

It can also help to reduce errors in sales data. So, you can determine what aspect of your business needs improvement. 

Customer behavior analysis and predictive analytics

Like what we mentioned earlier, big data visualization is efficient in enhancing your customers’ experience. With visualization methods, you can understand the behavior of your customers. So, you can develop techniques to meet their needs. It can help with predictive analytics and gaining more potential clients for your business. 

Discover patterns at scale and create predictions 

If you integrate big data visualization with advanced analytics, you can discover patterns in data sets that can help you create predictions, develop strategy and determine trends based on the fundamental insights it can provide you.

Facilitates understanding and perception

Another advantage of big data visualization in an organization is it facilitates understanding and perception. With the help of graphical representations, you and your team can understand the meaning of data quickly. With that, they can get important insights that can help them increase their productivity on their duties and responsibilities in your organization. 

Saves time 

Big data visualization helps to save the time of your employees. They can make detailed reports, respond to ad hoc data retrieval requests, modify dashboards, and more. With interactive visualization, your team can focus more on their specific jobs. 

Promotes interaction with data 

Another benefit of big data visualization is it promotes interaction with data. So, your employees can make actionable insight to improve the processes of your business. It also helps you to see data from different perspectives. It can help to formulate effective solutions to enhance the products and services of your business. 

Quick access to business insights 

Once your business use visualization initiatives, your team can easily access meaningful insights from the big data sets. They can discover hidden trends and relevant patterns from the data. 

Better analysis 

With data visualization, your team can have a better analysis of the data. They can quickly analyze product interests, marketing strategies, and sales. With their better analysis, they can focus on areas that need attention to improve profits. 

Finding errors 

Visualization of data can also help to find errors in data. If erroneous data was identified sooner, it could be removed from the analysis. 

Understanding the story 

Your Business Intelligence software dashboard’s purpose is storytelling. If you use great visualization of your data, your target audience can easily understand your story in just a glance. 

With these benefits, you can make sure that big data visualization can be a good investment for your business’s growth and development. 

Introduction to Charts, Plots, Maps and other elements in data visualization

Data visualization has different elements. Let us discuss it below. 

  • Charts : Interactive charts utilize elements to compare different components. These elements suit the values of variables and show the relationship of the data points. 
  • Donut and pie charts: These charts compare parts of a whole like components of a category. The arc and angle of every aspect correspond to the illustrated value.
  • Line chart : The lines are comparable elements that can help you analyze fall and peak moments in an axis variant like sales volume over a period. 
  • Bar chart: The bar displays each value, either horizontal or vertical. 
  • Plots: This element of data visualization presents data sets in 3D or 2D. 
  • Bubble plot: The markers for this plot are bubbles. The bubble plot size represents another variable. 
  • Scatter (X-Y) plot: This plot provides the mutual variation of 2 data items, the X and Y-axis. 
  • Histogram plot: It can represent the element variable over a specific time. 
  • Maps: Maps can position data points on various areas and objects like building projects, geographical maps, and layouts. It can be a dot distribution map or heat maps. 

You can also use other elements of data visualization like the following:

  • Word Clouds : This data visualization provides the frequency of the word within a body of the text. Bigger words are more relevant. 
  • Network Diagrams: The relationships are made as nodes and ties to analyze social networks. It is also used to map product sales across geographic areas. 
  • Box and whisker plot : The box and whisker plot displays the distribution of big data. It shows the data with a graphical display of 5 statistics, including median, minimum, lower quartile, upper quartile, and maximum. The extreme values are displayed by whiskers which extend out from the edges of the box. 
  • Kernel density estimation : The kernel density estimation can be a good big data visualization technique to understand the amount and distribution of data. It shows the probability distribution function. 
  • Correlation matrices : Correlation matrices are used to summarize data as output or input for advanced analyses, which make identification of relationships between variables. 

There we go, so those are the elements of big data visualization you can use for your organization.

Here are few charts available in Power BI to use while creating interactive business intelligence reports.

Essential tips for efficient data visualization In Power BI

  • Make simpler widgets. 
  • Display relevant facts.
  • Use less data with the use of filters. 
  • Hide unwanted details in the visuals.
  • Categorize big data through drill-down behavior.
  • Offer focus on your widgets using pleasant colors.
  • Avoid showing too much information. 
  • Auto-refresh the visuals to display the most recent data.
  • Choose widgets that convey your data story. 
  • Capture the interest of decision-makers and make dashboards accordingly.

What are some examples of data visualization?

Some examples of data visualization include the following:

  • Linear -it may include sorted items by a single feature or simply a list of items.
  • Volumetric/ 3D – computer simulations, 3D computer models
  • Planar/ 2D/ geospatial – dot distribution maps, Cartograms, contour maps, proportional symbol maps
  • Temporal – time series charts, timelines, arc diagrams, connected scatter plots, circumplex charts.
  • Tree/ hierarchical – radial tree charts, dendrograms, hyperbolic tree charts
  • Multidimensional – histograms, Pie charts, tree-maps, bar charts, spider charts, heat maps  

With these visualization examples, you can have the powerful business capability to make your organization stand out in your specific industry. It can help to create more useful insights that can bring opportunities for your business. 

Microsoft Power BI capabilities for big data visualization

Power BI Logo

Microsoft Power BI offers business intelligence tools that can be used for big data visualization. This cloud-based (SAAS BI) platform can consolidate data from various sources to a single data set. Microsoft Power BI has the capabilities for big data visualization.                        

The Power BI can provide different attractive and detailed visualizations to make dashboards and Power BI reports. With the tool, you can make visualizations including:

  • Stacked column chart
  • Stacked bar chart
  • Line chart
  • Stacked area chart
  • Waterfall chart
  • Clustered bar chart
  • Ribbon chart
  • Pie chart
  • Map
  • Gauge chart and more

Understanding Map Visualization, Combination Charts, Tables, Colors option, Shapes, images, and text box and report styling options in Power BI

Power BI can provide you with great visualizations to present your data effectively. It has different default data visualization components like combination charts, tables, map visualizations, images, shapes, text boxes, and report styling options. 

In Power BI, there are two types of map visualization, shape maps and bubble maps. Combination charts can plot different measure values. In tables, you can drag the elements you want to add to your report. You can also modify the colors according to your needs. 

With Power BI, you can also add images, shapes, and text box and even add URLs in the text box. You can make reports with its styling options. You can adjust the formatting and page layout like page size and orientation. 

Most frequently used big data visualization techniques in Power BI

The most frequently used big data visualization techniques in Power BI include maps, donut/ pie charts, line charts, bar charts, and more. 

  • Maps : Maps in Power BI are among the commonly used visualization techniques in viewing sales in various places. 
  • Donut/ pie charts : Pie/ donut charts can display data well and show different categories. 
  • Line charts: The line chart is used to provide greater data visualization. It can help to offer insights for your team to make more effective decisions. 
  • Bar charts : Bar charts are also among the top visualization techniques in Microsoft Power BI. Bar charts can help to make more understandable reports. 

EPC Group approach for Power BI implementation as a data visualization tool

EPC Group understands that data visualization tools are important for the growth of any business. With that, they have a holistic approach for Power BI implementation as a data visualization tool. 

EPC Group joined forces with their customers to establish the needed requirements to offer effective business intelligence and big data visualization plan to improve businesses. EPC Group helps organizations collaborate, analyze and share data with Power BI. 

Conclusion  

To sum it up, Big Data Visualization is an effective tool to grow your business. Big data visualization tools like Microsoft Power BI allow you to connect with lots of sources of data and create reports on the web and mobile devices. 

Big Data Visualization can offer amazing benefits for the success of your business. It can make your data more understandable and accessible to your team as well as to your target audience. 

Big data visualization is a great tool to open more opportunities for your organization. It can also help to enhance team collaboration that can lead to better productivity. Are you ready to level up your business’ data strategy? If yes, it is a wise decision to use a big data visualization. It can provide you wide options of tools to get insights from a big data. What are you waiting for? Use the excellent tools for big data visualizations today to grow your business!    

Errin O'Connor
About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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