Power BI is an extremely powerful data visualization tool. It can handle a wide variety of reporting needs, but if you’re just starting out designing reports, or if you’ve already gotten a handle of Power BI, you may be wondering how you can use all these cool visuals and tools to create something that someone—your coworker, your manager, whomever—can get real value and insight from.

So let’s discuss some general rules that you can consider when you design in Power BI to remove barriers to use. After all, at the end of the day, we just want to make sure all our hard work goes somewhere useful.

Community Summit NA is a once-a-year chance to gather with other Microsoft users in a space that encourages growth, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. There's something for everyone, and you'll leave feeling refreshed, inspired, and well-equipped to make real, positive change in your organization.

Ever heard the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”? Well, the things we measure are in our sight, on our minds, and therefore more likely to be the target of change. We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where gathering data, making sense of it, and garnering actionable insight from it is as easy as it has ever been. The data begs to be used.

From the ancient masters of rhetoric themselves, we are told that logos, or logic, is an effective way to persuade an audience. And all of recorded history is a testament to the power of storytelling, a most innate human attribute, to influence people’s actions. Therefore, being able to tell a story with logic, with data, must be an effective way to understand the world and act within it according to our goals.

This is the foundation to which Microsoft’s Power BI application is based. Tell a compelling story through the visualizations of data, and that story can help inform decisions that will benefit businesses.

It’s time. Time to come together again, in-person, and bask in the connections and momentum that comes from being together and learning together. Community Summit North America 2021 will be held in Houston, Texas from October 12-15, and you’re invited. Summit organizers encourage you to come with questions, and you will leave with answers.

If Summit is new to you, or if it’s been a while since your organization has attended, here are the reasons why you should consider attending and how to make the most of Summit NA when you’re there.

Setting goals is the best way to keep members of an organization focused on and working towards the same objective. The Microsoft Power BI team has announced the public preview of Goals in Power BI. This feature will help businesses to use the metric and data analysis capabilities of Power BI to create and adapt business objectives. With Goals, Power BI groups together the important, defined statistics to measure and predict progress.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a powerful digital marketing application that help users create marking content and distribute it manually or through automated processes. Its wide variety of tools make it effective for most marketing campaigns. Dynamics 365 Marketing has its own insights and analytics tools to help marketers learn what has proved effective and what can be improved.

However, with the use of Microsoft Dataverse and Power BI, interactive, highly customizable reports can be created to boost the visibility of important marketing data. Power BI is also a low-code solution, so, while coding knowledge can be helpful, an extensive background in development is not needed to make effective, good-looking reports.

Power BI can get really complicated, really fast. How do you cut through all of the technical terminology and just use it? How do you know when you are over your head and need to ask for help from a technical resource? In this webinar hosted by CEO of Syvantis, Janelle Riley, and Consulting Manager, Jack Walther, the Syvantis team explores Power BI from the perspective of a finance user of Dynamics GP.

Business Central from Microsoft gives users more power in their ERP solution than ever before. Through integrations and connections to the other systems they already use, Business Central lets users accomplish more in one program than they normally would in 5. See how you can incorporate the products you use to make Business Central work best for you.