Skill 1.1: Describe the business value of Power Platform services
The Microsoft Power Platform elements allow businesses to work with their data in more efficient ways, by analyzing and displaying it with Power BI, modifying and processing it with Power Apps, and automating its collection with Power Automate.
This skill covers how to:
■ Analyze data by using Power BI
■ Build solutions that use Common Data Service
■ Create flows by using Power Automate
■ Use connectors to access services and data
■ Create powerful chatbots by using a guided, no-code graphical interface
Analyze data using Power BI
Businesses are frequently inundated with data from many sources and in many formats, often more than users can easily access, interpret, and assimilate. Data in its raw form—basically tables or lists of numbers—can be difficult for large groups to understand and use effectively. This is why it has long been a common practice for businesses to convert numerical data into charts and graphs. Users can see at a glance the relationships between values in a chart that would be much more obscure in numerical form.
An individual user can easily transform the data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into a chart and share it with other users, but when the data changes, the spreadsheet and chart must be updated and redistributed. In addition, today’s business environments also frequently store large amounts of data in a variety of locations and media formats, not just spreadsheets maintained by a single user.
Power BI is a tool that can access data from multiple sources, transform it into a variety of graphical formats, and publish the results in a cloud-based service that users can access from any location, using virtually any device.
Power BI allows users to access and view their data in ways that are more intuitive and convenient than traditional tables and lists of numbers. Graphs and charts can provide an immediate impression of the data’s current values, as opposed to a detailed examination of the numbers that can take much more time and expertise to interpret. In addition, the Power BI user interface can allow users to interact with their data, such as by displaying additional information when they click a data point.
Power BI is a tool that consists of services, applications, and connectors that can access data from multiple sources and display it in various ways. Power BI does not manipulate or modify the data in any way. Whether a user is a designer using Power BI Desktop to model data or a consumer using the Power BI reading view to display the published data, nothing that either type of user does can possibly modify or delete the underlying data itself.
Power BI consists of two main components:
■ Power BI service—A cloud service that provides Power BI’s consumer functions by allowing users to access the content that designers have created
■ Power BI Desktop—A Windows application that designers use to gather data; transform that data by creating dashboards, reports, and apps; and publish it to the Power BI service
