Introduction
By the end of this module, you'll be able to take your first step in changing from Tableau to Microsoft Power BI. Tableau and Power BI provide a set of tools that enables analysts and Enterprise Business Intelligence professionals to build visualizations and get insights from their data. These same tools cover the full spectrum of data connectivity, preparation, modeling, creating visualizations, and collaboration.
Video: Introduction to Power BI for Tableau users
Lifecycle comparison
In today's data world, it's essential for companies to empower as many users as possible to gather actionable insights from quality data. These actionable insights are taken from reports that are built into tools like Tableau and Power BI. To get these insights, you'd use these tools (and their features) at different stages in a report-building lifecycle: prepare, explore, visualize, and share and collaborate.
| Prepare | Explore | Visualize | Share and collaborate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Power BI product | Power Query Editor | Power BI Desktop | Power BI Desktop or Web-Edit in Power BI service | Power BI service |
| Definition | Connect to data sources. Clean and transform. | Define relationships. Define DAX calculations. Look for patterns and insights in the cleaned data. | Create visuals and custom visuals. Create visuals with R or Python. | Permissions and Security. Embed visuals in other products. Subscriptions. Data flows. |
| Tableau equivalent | Tableau Prep Alteryx | Tableau Desktop | Tableau Desktop | Tableau Server Tableau Online |
The following sections further explain these report-building stages, which are necessary steps toward understanding your data by using the Power BI toolkit.
Prepare your data
The goal of data preparation is to make the data accessible for users, analysts, customers, partners, coworkers, and more. You use Power Query Editor to prepare the data, which has rich formatting capabilities. This tool is built into Power BI Desktop and allows you to connect to many different data sources and transform your data to your preference. As a result, you can explore and visualize the data to gain insights. Power Query Editor is intuitive and offers numerous transformation options.
Explore your data
After the data is prepared and organized, you can explore the data with Power BI Desktop. Similar to Tableau Desktop, using Power BI Desktop is a great way to help you become familiar with the data. You can set up calculations by using the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language to keep your reports dynamic. These calculations will further explore the data when you apply filters. You can also define relationships, which allows you to combine data from multiple, disparate data sources.
Visualize your data
After you've fully explored your data and know the focus areas within your data, you can design a report. With Power BI Desktop, you can create rich, interactive reports with visual analytics. As an analyst and a report designer, you need to choose the best visuals that engage your users. The number of visual choices in Power BI Desktop is nearly limitless because you can add custom visuals.
Share and collaborate your data
Once you've created your report, the next step is to publish the report to Power BI service to share with your audience. With Power BI service, you can set the report to automatically refresh the data, apply permissions and security to the reports, and create report subscriptions. If necessary, other people can use the same prepared dataset for their own personal exploration.