Power BI is a reporting tool that can connect to almost any data source, model that data, and create visuals to tell the story of that data in a clear, accurate way. What was once too much data to parse through easily becomes clear data visualizations (live dashboards, interactive reports, charts, graphs, plots, tables…) that provide actionable insights to improve your business.

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.

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.

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.