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What is data visualization?

Every day your business generates more data on sales revenue, marketing performance, customer interactions, inventory levels, production metrics, staffing levels, costs, and other KPIs. But with so much data to sift through, it can be difficult for people to see the story it tells.

Data visualization helps you turn all that granular data into easily understood, visually compelling—and useful—business information. By tapping into external data sources, today’s data visualization tools don’t simply let you see your KPIs more clearly, they unify data and apply AI-driven analytics to reveal relationships between your KPIs, the market, and the world.

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The benefits of data visualization.

Hidden within your data lie important insights that can help drive business forward. But the challenge is that you can’t always connect the dots by looking at raw numbers alone. When you look at your data presented in a visual format, patterns, connections, and other “a-ha” insights emerge that would otherwise remain out of sight.

Data visualization brings data to life, making you the master storyteller of the insights hidden within your numbers. Through live data dashboards , interactive reports, charts, graphs, and other visual representations, data visualization helps users develop powerful business insight quickly and effectively.

How to make the most of data visualization

Being able to see the story within the numbers makes data visualization a powerful tool for sharing and communicating information. Data visualization can be used for demonstrating performance, communicating trends, understanding the impact of new strategies, showing relationships, and beyond. These representations can be powerful tools for communication and collaboration, bringing greater value to reports, journalism, apps, or any context where sharing information is required.

Explore these interactive data visualization examples

Drive better decision making with data visualization

While stunning, rich visuals can be great tools for communicating ideas, the end benefit of data visualization is its ability to drive better decision making. Here are a few ways data visualization helps with strategic decision making:

• See the big picture.  There’s a clear picture of performance buried within the transaction, interaction, process, and behavioral data stored in your systems. Data visualization allows you to recognize the broader context and higher-level scenario within it. As a result, you’ll notice trends and spot patterns you wouldn't be able to see if you were looking at numbers on their own.
• Identify the significance.  Bringing visual clarity to the story told within your data helps you identify insights that lead to better decision making, planning, strategies, and actions. How is your business performing, what needs to be modified, and where should you focus your resources? The ability to understand the significance of your data drives more effective operations and decisions.
• Make informed decisions.  With concrete numbers and tangible insights, you can be confident your decisions are backed by data. Having clear insight into performance metrics empowers you with the knowledge and arms you with the tools to make the right decisions at the right time.
• Track trends over time.  Once you've established a baseline, trends will begin to emerge. Track progress, spot trends, and begin using your insights to drive informed, strategic decisions. As you build your trends, shifts in patterns indicate if things drift off track, allowing you to immediately address any sign of lowered performance.

Evaluating data visualization tools

Today’s data visualization tools run the gamut from free versions you can access with a browser to feature-rich platforms that integrate with a wide variety of mainstream business applications.

But with so many  data visualization tools , how do you choose the right solution for your specific needs? In the end, you want a tool that gives you the insights you need to help you focus on what matters most.

Here are some key questions you’ll want to keep in mind as you look for a data visualization solution with the right balance of power, flexibility, and ease-of-use for your needs:

What are your goals and needs?

Take a moment to list out what types of data you have and what kinds of information and insights you want to gather.

What features do you require?

Top data visualization solutions include features like  business intelligence , analytics, enterprise reporting capabilities, giving you flexibility to meet your needs both today and tomorrow.

Where will your data come from?

Consider how you’ll connect or import your data and determine if the tool offers a seamless fit with your systems.

Where will you need to see your data?

Find a tool that allows you to take your data and dashboards with you on any device, for quick insight and collaboration anywhere you are.

Where would you like to publish your visualization?

Think about where your final presentation will be published. On a website, in a blog post, or in an online news article? Find a tool that allows flexibility to post and share your data visualization wherever your story should be told—one that lets you create data stories with amazing interactive visualizations and easily publish them to your blog or website.

Learn more about the benefits of data visualization

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What is Power BI?

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Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data might be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

The parts of Power BI

Power BI consists of several elements that all work together, starting with these three basics:

• A Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop .
• An online software as a service (SaaS) service called the Power BI service .
• Power BI Mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices.

These three elements—Power BI Desktop, the service, and the mobile apps—are designed to let you create, share, and consume business insights in the way that serves you and your role most effectively.

Beyond those three, Power BI also features two other elements:

• Power BI Report Builder , for creating paginated reports to share in the Power BI service. Read more about paginated reports later in this article.
• Power BI Report Server , an on-premises report server where you can publish your Power BI reports, after creating them in Power BI Desktop. Read more about Power BI Report Server later in this article.

How Power BI matches your role

How you use Power BI depends on your role in a project or on a team. Other people, in other roles, might use Power BI differently.

For example, you might primarily use the Power BI service to view reports and dashboards. Your number-crunching, business-report-creating coworker might make extensive use of Power BI Desktop or Power BI Report Builder to create reports, then publish those reports to the Power BI service, where you view them. Another coworker, in sales, might mainly use the Power BI Mobile app to monitor progress on sales quotas, and to drill into new sales lead details.

If you're a developer, you might use Power BI APIs to push data into semantic models or to embed dashboards and reports into your own custom applications. Have an idea for a new visual? Build it yourself and share it with others.

You also might use each element of Power BI at different times, depending on what you're trying to achieve or your role for a given project.

How you use Power BI can be based on which feature or service of Power BI is the best tool for your situation. For example, you can use Power BI Desktop to create reports for your own team about customer engagement statistics and you can view inventory and manufacturing progress in a real-time dashboard in the Power BI service. You can create a paginated report of mailable invoices, based on a Power BI semantic model. Each part of Power BI is available to you, which is why it's so flexible and compelling.

Explore documents that pertain to your role:

• Power BI for business users
• Power BI Desktop for report creators
• Power BI Report Builder for enterprise report creators
• Power BI for administrators
• What is Power BI embedded analytics?
• Create your own visuals in Power BI
• What can developers do with the Power BI API?

The flow of work in Power BI

One common workflow in Power BI begins by connecting to data sources in Power BI Desktop and building a report. You then publish that report from Power BI Desktop to the Power BI service, and share it so business users in the Power BI service and on mobile devices can view and interact with the report.

This workflow is common, and shows how the three main Power BI elements complement one another.

Use the deployment pipeline tool

In the Power BI service, you can use the deployment pipeline tool to test your content before you release it to your users. The deployment pipeline tool can help you deploy reports, dashboards, semantic models, and paginated reports. Read about how to get started with deployment pipelines in the Power BI service.

How Microsoft Fabric works with Power BI

Microsoft Fabric is an offering that combines data + services in a unified environment, making it easier to perform analysis and analytics on various sets of data. Power BI is an example of one of the services that's integrated with Microsoft Fabric, and your organization's OneLake data store is an example of the data that can be used, analyzed, or visualized. Large organizations find Microsoft Fabric particularly useful, since it can corral and then bring greater value to large stores of data, then using services (like Power BI) to bring such data to business life.

Administration of Power BI is now handled by Microsoft Fabric, but your favorite tools like the Power BI service and Power BI Desktop still operate like they always have - as a service that can turn your data, whether in OneLake or in Excel, into powerful business intelligence insights.

Paginated reports in the Power BI service

Another workflow involves paginated reports in the Power BI service. Enterprise report creators design paginated reports to be printed or shared. They can also share these reports in the Power BI service. They're called paginated because they're formatted to fit well on a page. They're often used for operational reports, or for printing forms such as invoices or transcripts. They display all the data in a table, even if the table spans multiple pages. Power BI Report Builder is the standalone tool for authoring paginated reports.

Read more about paginated reports in the Power BI service.

On-premises reporting with Power BI Report Server

What if you need to keep your reports on premises, say, behind a firewall? Read on.

You can create, deploy, and manage Power BI reports in Power BI Desktop, and paginated reports in Report Builder, with the ready-to-use tools and services that Power BI Report Server provides.

Power BI Report Server is a solution that you deploy behind your firewall and then deliver your reports to the right users in different ways, whether that's viewing them in a web browser, on a mobile device, or as an email. And because Power BI Report Server is compatible with Power BI in the cloud, you can move to the cloud when you're ready.

Read more about Power BI Report Server .

Related content

• What is Microsoft Fabric?
• Comparison of Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service
• Tutorial: Learn your way around the Power BI service
• Tutorial: Get started with the Power BI service
• Quickstart: Connect to data in Power BI Desktop

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