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Searching for latest Technology trends will fetch you "Data Visualization", as one of the latest trends. Why Data Visualization? In simple terms Data Visualization is visual representation of data. It is the key element and important stepping stone for Data Driven Decision Making (DDDM). Data driven decision making (or DDDM) is the process of making organizational decisions based on actual data rather than intuition or observation alone. Every industry today aims to be data-driven. There is an old saying which goes as "There's Gold in Those Hidden Data Sources". If data is visualyzed properly, it can bring valuable Businness Insights leading to enourmous progression and competitive edge for organizations.

In this blog post we will walk through rather simple ways of Data preparation, relationships, and reporting using Microsoft Power BI. Now most of us are using Microsoft Office everyday and very much familiar with office products. Power BI is a part of Power Apps and easily downloadable as Power BI Desktop. The Reports created in Power BI Desktop can easily be published as online reports to Power Bi Service (https://app.powerbi.com).

For this blog post, I have used data sources which I have extracted as excel sheets and XML files from SAP ECC, as this blog post is not related to integration, but this does not restrict you from connecting directly to SAP systems from Power BI.

Data Visualization using Power BI

Get Data

Now let's try to build some meaningful business insights form the Customers data of an organization. The Customers data has been extracted as XML format from SAP ECC.

Customers XML

This data can be easily uploaded to Power BI desktop as below and viewed in Power BI Data view.

Customers Data View

And now comes the most interesting part. The data is transformed accordingly and visualized as Reports in Power BI Report View. The report serves as Storytelling which brings out valuable business insights.

Data Visualization (Customers Segment Storytelling)

Data modelling is also possible where relationships can be created. The good part is that data can remain in separate tables as it is and through relationships they can be combined into one Data Set.