Scope of the possible with Power BI

Power BI
overview
Published

March 12, 2026

Previous attendees have said…

  • 73 previous attendees have left feedback
  • 99% would recommend this session to a colleague
  • 96% said that this session was pitched correctly

NoteThree random comments from previous attendees

  • Session was very insightful

  • as ever a good session. Thank you

  • Good session, currently using power BI with a suite of dashboards built. Issues regarding IG would be really beneficial to discuss at length perhaps in a different session.

Why this session?

  • Power BI is genuinely useful for health and care work
  • but (like always) that recommendation comes with quibbles and qualifiers
  • this session = non-technical, unvarnished advice about what Power BI does, where it shines, how it might help your service, and ways of putting it into action

Session outline

  • what’s Power BI
  • build-a-dashboard demo
  • strengths and weaknesses
  • alternatives
  • skill development

Power BI?

  • tool to build interactive dashboards
  • newish (c.2015), proprietary, paid-for
  • integrates functions from several Microsoft data products (bits of Excel, PowerPivot, PowerQuery…, SQL reporting products)
  • a terminal analysis product: designed to make dashboards that users can use, rather that wrangle data/do statistical analysis

Power BI demo

We’ll use a pair of Excel files. These are based on three datasets from the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data portal:

GP practice data
Name PracticeListSize Postcode HBName GPCluster Code
Newhills Medical Practice 10056 G34 9HQ NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde NE - Easterhouse/Ruchazie 46451
Mossend Surgery 6350 ML4 1DQ NHS Lanarkshire Bellshill 62011
Brechin Medical Practice 8652 DD9 7AN NHS Tayside North East/Angus 10498

Load some data

Lots of different data loading options

Preview

Friendly tools for previewing data

Add to a map

Clever use of commercial postcode data

Add interactions

Visualisations are interactive

Publish

Add more visuals

30-odd built in, hundreds of free additional visuals, thousands of (often dodgy) commercial add-ins

Add more data

Add more data

Totally different data, but harmonised process for loading

Re-shape that data

Neatly-integrated PowerQuery, gives loads of scope for tidying and fixing data

Data modelling tools

Full suite of relational tools for the more ambitious projects

Pre-packed visuals

Microsoft’s Tornado chart

Demographics

These can be cross filtered to give national/board/practice level insights

Strengths

  • by far the easiest way of producing simple interactive data products
  • great tools for tidying data and wranging data sources
  • shines as a way of data hubbing / self-service data
  • happy with bigger data than Excel can handle
  • nice iterative workflow
  • scales well, especially if you’re working for a very large number of users
  • potential to manage complex and sensitive data on existing infrastructure

Weaknesses

  • terminal analysis product. Don’t expect/try to get data out of Power BI, it’s absolutely not designed to be used for that
  • for most of us, users need to be licenced - or expect to spend extra money to make dashboards available to non-licenced users
  • cross-organisation use is really messy
  • adding extra features (real-time data, e.g.) can be complicated and expensive
  • steepening pain curve. Easy to start projects, but more involved analysis is messy
  • complex IG landscape - reminder for NHS colleagues about national guidance on Power BI
  • low-code, rather than no-code

Alternatives

  • R/Shiny - potentially free, flexible, code-based, requires infrastructure, unclear governance landscape
  • Tableau - non-free, non-code-based, no infrastructure

Skill development

We have a range of different Power BI training options available. Please see the main Power Platform training page for details