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10 Ways You Know You’re a Business Analyst

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

So you start your day with a quad shot Americano, end up dreaming about countless Excel documents and spend just as much time digging through piles of data as you do scrubbing for insights… Sound familiar? Looks like you may be a business analyst. And we have a feeling the rest of these characteristics just might resonate with you as well.

  1. You spend days trying to find the right data. Do you spend 80% of your time hunting down data? You shouldn’t have to go on a data safari. Power BI has built in support for popular cloud services, such as and QuickBooks Online. Connect to data in Excel spreadsheets, your favorite online services, and databases inside your organization. Power BI collects your data in one place, and you can even access it on the go with native Power BI Mobile apps. So stop hunting for your data, and start analyzing.
  2. You wait weeks for IT to extract data from a web data source. You don’t have time to wait for IT; you need instant access to your data so why not import it yourself? Power BI connects to SaaS sources such as Microsoft Dynamics and Google Analytics, and even big data sources such as Hadoop.
  3. You think ETL means “Every Time Late.”We hear you. Data cleansing shouldn’t take forever. Why should you stress about transforming data, mashing it in Excel, and performing step after manual step to create simple reports? With Power BI, you can readily clean, transform, and mash-up data from multiple data sources. Then rapidly publish and share interactive reports with your users.
  4. Your clients are constantly impatient with getting the information they need to make timely decisions.How much time did you spend copying and pasting data into static PowerPoint decks? What if you could connect your presentations to the data directly, enabling real-time updates, speeding time to insight, and driving faster, informed decision-making?  Imagine getting insights from your data by asking questions in natural language, and getting an interactive visualization as an answer. Now, that would impress your clients! Power BI makes it possible.
  5. You feel stupid when IT tries to explain MDX, OLAP, and SQL.Why feel limited by your technical abilities? Power BI will empower you. You can perform your data gathering and analysis within Excel no SQL or MDX programming or technical background required.
  6. You go back and forth endlessly with IT to create data views.Evolve from having to go back and forth with IT to create each view to a place where you can self-serve through Power BI’s easy-to-use tools, tap into one version of the truth, and build views in minutes.
  7. You’re brain dead after pasting static Excel sheets into hundreds of PowerPoint slides.Suppose you could build reports that present insights through a blend of real-time data slides and normal slides. Power BI reduces the time you spend performing report creation freeing you up for value-added analysis.
  8. You ask yourself why you spend so much effort on #7 when the information is outdated by the time you’re finished. Good question. Power BI live dashboards and interactive reports provide a consolidated, real-time view of data regardless of where it lives, on-premises or in the cloud. Mix standard slides with real-time data slides to drive key business messages. The real-time data slides enable users to explore data interactively and flexibly to answer critical business questions on-the-spot.
  9. You wonder why it’s so cumbersome to share data with colleagues. We get it. You had to post a report to a company site, and then users had to obtain access using company accounts. With Power BI you create dashboards and reports on data sources, bundle them, and share them with your colleagues as packaged solutions. Plus you can schedule automatic data refresh for the whole content pack.
  10. You’re constantly thinking, “There must be a more efficient way.” We have good news, the solution you’ve been looking for finally exists.  Power BI enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of live data through built-in dashboards, provides interactive reports, and enables you to create visualizations with ease.
Spending your day knee deep in data and digging for insights is the name of the game  so why not have a little fun with it? Power BI turns your data into beautiful visuals and gives you the power to connect, combine and analyze all of your information on one platform. Give it a spin today so you can at the very least stop dreaming about pivot tables and start dreaming about something a little more beautiful.