BI Book - stretching Power BI’s limits

BI Book is a multipurpose reporting tool that is built on Power BI. In addition to Power BI’s standard features, it also provides several useful extra features to ease reporting and budgeting. In this article, BI Book’s Product Owner Valtteri Nättiaho tells more about the benefits of using BI Book instead of only Power BI.

What is BI Book?

BI Book reporting and analytics tool provides a shortcut for implementing BI reporting in days instead of months. BI Book’s users do not have to worry about building their own data warehouse, integrations, report templates, or buying the expensive Power BI premium capacity themselves. BI Book provides all of them as a built-in solution. BI Book’s users do not need to take care of maintaining those either.

These pre-built solutions enable saving tens of thousands of euros and time. BI Book does not require any coding skills or previous experience from Power BI. The tool also brings cost savings for those companies that already have their own BI environment. In addition to Power BI’s features, it also provides crucial extra features to ease reporting and budgeting.

BI Book’s features

Currently, BI Book has four main sections and one more in development. These sections are “Company management,” Analytics,” “Forms,” “Files,” and upcoming “Jobs.” Each section offers different functionalities unique to BI Book as an analytics platform.

Company management

Company management is the one-stop management hub for distributing and customizing reports within BI Book. Here users can update datasets, create new reports by customizing existing reports, activate data integrations, and see API keys related to the environment.

Company management solves the classical issue of “How can I easily distribute and manage my reports?”.

Analytics

The Analytics section contains the actual BI reports related to an environment. Here users can navigate to different reports and view different pages of these reports. Users can also customize the visuals to match their preferences if editing mode is enabled in the viewing report. Additionally, users can easily switch the language settings of the reports to match their desired language and select a theme that they find pleasing.

Forms

Forms is the data input section of BI Book. Here users have access to forms and tables created for their environment. One possible use case is using forms as a template for budgeting. Users can enter budget data into a budget template, and this data is afterward updated to the analytics section.

Files

The Files section enables BI Book users to download and manage files within BI Book. If Forms is not your preferred way, for example, budgeting, you can easily upload an Excel budget and use this as a data source in your reports. Excel is not the only supported file type, and you can use files to manage all kinds of files depending on your needs.

Jobs

For now, I will not describe the Jobs section since it is a topic that should be discussed in a future article when it is ready to be officially released. As a teaser, I can reveal that Jobs will change the way users can manage processes related to data in BI Book.

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