March 23, 2023

The Complete Guide to Adding New Data Sets to Existing Data in Power BI

Let’s understand what is Power BI? Power BI is Business Intelligence (BI) software by Microsoft. Power BI is used to understand complex business data which is hard to understand. One of the familiar and most common examples is to generate a live dashboard of personalized business intelligence data.

Microsoft’s Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence platform that empowers you to analyze, visualize, aggregate and share data. It includes Multi-software services, connectors, and apps that work in sequential order to bring together unlinked sources of data and translate them into interactive, visually immersive, and valuable environments, hence allowing you to get a real-time 360-degree view of your business, from anywhere, 24*7 and on any device with internet connectivity, helping you to make effective data-driven conclusions. Some of the features of Microsoft Power BI are:

  • Power BI dashboard
  • Built-in AI capabilities
  • Prebuilt and custom data connectors
  • Excel integration
  • Powerful semantic models
  • Access to real-time analytics
  • Open connectivity framework
  • Application lifecycle management (ALM) toolkit
  • No-limits Azure data lake
  • Pixel-perfect paginated reports
  • Microsoft Cloud App security
  • Hundreds of modern data visuals.
  • Drag and drop canvas
     

How Can Power BI Help You with Your Business?
 

Microsoft’s Power BI helps businesses see not only what’s happened in the past and what’s happening in the present, but also forecasts what might happen in the future. Power BI is built with machine learning abilities, meaning it can spot patterns in data and use the patterns accordingly to make informed predictions and run supposing scenarios. These estimates allow businesses to generate forecasts, and prepare themselves to meet future demand and other important figures.

Businesses which need more analytical muscle and reporting power than that obtainable by Excel, Power BI is the next level in business intelligence. With Power BI, businesses can assemble, visualize and scrutinize data from across the company, giving them better insight into their performance and operations, and thus giving them opportunities to make more well-versed decisions based on real data. Here highlighted below are some proven benefits to the businesses:

  • Enhance data analysis
  • Gain real-time business view
  • Enhance timely data-driven decision-making
  • Discover and share meaningful insights
  • Simplify sharing large volumes of data
  • Find answers faster with industry-leading AI
     

Finding & Connecting to Power BI:
 

There are some different versions of Power BI to choose from, depending on your needs, your budget and how you want to set it up. These versions range from light use to wide-ranging features and from free to premium, so users can select the one that best meets their business requirements.

You can opt for a Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop, and an online Software as a Service (SaaS) called the Power BI service, a mobile Power BI app available on Android and iOS phones and tablets, or an on-premise version known as Power BI Report Server and there is also a white-label service for software professionals and developers.
 

Here’s a quick overview of the different versions and some of their pricing:
 

  • Power BI Desktop (Free, for small to midsize businesses)
  • Power BI Service
  • Power BI Pro (Paid per-user license, needed for access to advanced features and the ability to share reports)
  • Power BI Premium (Licenses by scale, intended for large businesses and enterprises)
  • Power BI Mobile (Device based app for tablets and phones)
  • Power BI Embedded (white-label version of Power BI which Independent Software Vendors can integrate in their own apps, rather than build their own analytical features)
  • Power BI Report Server (on-premise version of the Power BI Desktop app for businesses that need to keep & store their data and reports on their own servers)

How much does Power BI cost? Due to the wide-range of plans and versions available for Power BI, there’s a price point for every user. Power BI Mobile and Power BI Desktop are free, Power BI Embedded is a pay as you use service, and Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium are priced according to how many users will be accessing the platform, and how much is their usage. Here are some of the pricing and rest can be checked on Microsoft’s site:

  • Power BI Pro costs $9.99 per user/per month.
  • Power BI Pro is also included with the Office 365 Enterprise plan, which costs $35 per user/per month.
     

Adding a New Data Set to an Existing Workbook
 

Here I am assuming that your new excel spreadsheet gets updated every week/month/quarter and is of similar structure to the data that you have used for building your dashboard. For this case, you can append this new data to the existing data in Power BI Query Editor.

1) In Power BI, import this new excel file as a data source.

2) Go to the Query Editor. Here you will see your new dataset and old dataset.

3) Click on your old dataset file in query editor and navigate to Append Queries option as shown below:

4) You can either append new data in existing data source which is used for visualizations or append as a new.

Here I will suggest the Append Queries option in this case, which appends new rows to in hand data.

And when you’ll click on this, you get the following window as shown below in pic:

Select your new dataset file here as indicated in the above picture. This will append the new data to the old existing dataset and there it is; it should work.

Adding New Data Sets to Existing Data in Power BI is an Excellent Way of Supercharging Your Business as; once the outline of the whole process has been understood, it is then probable to plan how your business should advance Power BI and which personnel should be drawn in at which stage.  The purpose of this is to provide that quick outline, so you can direct resources and plan the introduction of Power BI to your company.
 

Conclusion:
 

Power BI is an incredible tool for visualizing data, offering variety of benefits for analysts who want to present their information skillfully and in a more creative order. Obviously, there are other tools too for visualization, so why should you go with Microsoft Power BI learning/certification as an alternative of anything else? Well the answer form the experts in the fields are that, there are a number of key features that it offers you that you won’t be finding elsewhere, so in my opinion it’s worth giving the time for; learning and practicing the most of its features as Power BI provides a great tool for people who wants to visualize and organize their data in multiplicity as It gives number of features so that you can analyze data in new and diverse ways.

One of the best sites for doing an e-learning course is from Mindcypress.com as at MindCypress, we provide Power BI training programs which have helped learners master the skills needed for using Power BI to the best advantage. The course curriculum has been planned by industry experts and has been improvised based on latest updates and requests by learners. If you are interested in doing Power BI certification but not sure how to decide or go for it, get in touch with our student support team on our site’s live chat. We would be happy to assist you in this BI certification and we have a very nominal fee for students, professionals and the course structure is to the point and very informative.